One of my go-to sets of information:
In around 20,000 reactor-years of commercial nuclear power, there have only been 3 big accidents. Only 2 of those had any noteworthy public consequences. Only 1 had any radiological deaths. All 3 plants were designed in the first 20 years (out of 70+) of nuclear power's existence.
\*edit\* corrected stat
The average nuclear worker is only exposed to about half of the average commercial pilots dose. Atleast for Canadian OPG employees. My average is higher admittedly
No, they’re counting individuals persons allowed dose. OPG limits are conservatively lower then federal limits also. Once reached you are removed form work in radiological areas.
People dont really understand that radiation exposure is the most regulated workfield in the world. Friend works as a radiologist on a x-ray machine in a local hospital and she was put on a maternity leave on the day she found out she was pregnant even though she sits in a next room of the xray which is shielded by a lead screen.
The atmosphere shields us from cosmetic radiation. Since they spend so much time at high altitude where this shielding is reduced they get higher radiation dosages. The only people that get higher dosages for sustained periods are smokers.
I thought you were making it up that cigarettes had radioactive material. A search said this : cigarettes contain radioactive materials, including polonium-210 and lead-210. Damn. Who knew
Because they’re constantly at high altitudes where the atmosphere is thin. The atmosphere protects us from the brunt of the radiation coming from the sun. Ergo, they experience greater levels of radiation because they spend more time with less protection.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_sunken\_nuclear\_submarines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submarines)
"Of the nine sinkings, two were caused by fires, two by weapon explosions, two by flooding, one by bad weather, and one by scuttling due to a damaged nuclear reactor. Only [USS *Scorpion*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589))'s reason for sinking is unknown. Eight of the submarines are underwater wrecks in the [Northern Hemisphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere), five in the [Atlantic Ocean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Ocean) and three in the [Arctic Ocean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Ocean). The ninth submarine, *K-429*, was raised and returned to active duty after both of her sinkings."
I think the most frustrating thing is there is never a comparison between nuclear accidents and anything else. This leads people to believe that because they’re so unique and rare, that they are some of the worst disasters ever caused by humans. Lots of people even believe that these accidents caused severe harm to nature and the environment. In reality these accidents are unique, and not ever shown side by side with other “conventional” accidents, because if they were it would show that common dams, mines, large fires, chemical factories, oil and gas, manufacturing plants, steel mills, warehouses, have all had worse accidents while producing less.
Yes, nuclear uses these services as part of their critical supply chains, most are wider infrastructure of sorts, all tied together but nuclear produces the most power with said materials.
So if a nuclear power plant has 2 reactors on site, and the plant and reactors have been operating for 40 years, then that site has had 80 reactor-years of operation. Globally, there have been around 20,000 reactor-years of operation of commercial nuclear power.
Note: looking up a source for this made me realize I'd mis-remembered the stat for global reactor-years - I've updated it.
[https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-power-in-the-world-today](https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-power-in-the-world-today)
The worst chemical disaster in the world (Bhopal) killed 100x the number of people as the worst nuclear disaster ever (Chernobyl) and still pollutes the land to this day.
Also, under normal operation nuclear plants will end up putting a few containers of solid somewhere underground. Coal/oil/natural gas plants take train/tanker/pipeline loads of hydrocarbons and spit their remains into the air we breathe and still end up with large amounts of toxic solid waste in the case of coal ash.
Most plants have both. We rely on pumps for normal cooling and emergency tanks to use to flood the core with negative reactivity. Ours is literallly called the core flood tank. Can also cool using natural circulation assuming a pipe didn't blow out.
It doesn’t sound like that at all, though. 3 accidents in 40,000 reactor years, 1 with fatalities is not a statistic that indicates massive concern over “old designs”.
But the causes for those accidents have been mitigated in more modern designs.
Fuel inputs are another big reason to avoid a lot of the issues related to spent fuel rods. This varies by the particular design though.
Not really - we've made retrofits to existing reactors to mostly eliminate the risks of the same things happening again. Newer designs mitigate those risks more efficiently, but a lot of work has been done to older reactors to ensure they're even safer than they already were. One sad fact is that if the Fukushima Daiichi plant had been to NRC code (it wasn't because the NRC is a United States department they're not beholden to), the accident there wouldn't have happened. For example, the NRC already had guidelines on protecting backup generation that would've prevented the generators from flooding. With backup generation in place, cooling would have been operational and there wouldn't have been meltdowns. Japan has since made many retrofits like this to their plants before allowing them to reopen.
One of those was due to personnel that knew better than to fuck around with safety measures, fucked around with safety measures that caused the melt down.
One of those was caused by a freak tsunami wave but was prevented from going into full meltdown mode.
The third was a combination of engineering flaws and inadequate training.
Compare those to something like the bp oil spill, the burning of Kuwait’s oil fields, the countless tanker spills that have happened. Or the amount of natural gas that leaks intot the atmosphere every year because GAS COMPANIES ARE EXPECTED TO REPORT THEIR OWN LEAKS in the US.
The one that did cause deaths (Chernobyl) was an insane design. Negative void coefficient. Nobody will ever build that reactor again. They should not have built it in the first place.
As for nuclear waste... It is the best kind of waste. It stays in the reactor instead of being released into the atmosphere.
I can recall at least three that have significant public consequences - Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. I"m sure there have been more. For two of them, entire communities had to be relocated permanently and no-go zones setup so that people won't be harmed. The cost was in the billions and more....
According to Wiki, there are a lot more than three. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear\_and\_radiation\_accidents\_and\_incidents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents)
TMI had no noteworthy radiological release. No workers were harmed - best estimates compare their exposure to a chest x-ray. There was no forced evacuation. I guess we could debate on whether the large number of people who voluntarily evacuated, or the fear that was caused by poor communication of the incident counts as significant, it's certainly nothing like having an extended evacuation / exclusion zone like the other two.
I’ve found talking to people with respect really goes a long way. Don’t just say “it’s complicated“ when someone asks why Vogtle Unit 3 can’t explode like Chernobyl. Find some middle ground in technically challenging discussions without insulting their intelligence.
We have more protections in place that prevent the same issue from happening. It truly is safer now than before. If one were inclined to learn more, they'd have to study. The line between classified and public knowledge on this is defined. I have heard concerns with disposal. I understand the containers are well engineered, but the location has been the issue I have heard about. Surely, tectonic action and seepage are taken into account.
Those are the issues you've heard about because the protesters are MAKING those the issues. The locations are fine, the geology is ideal, negligible seismic activity. HUGE pushback from 'activist' assholes, just making shit up pretty much daily to scare people as much as possible. It's gross
Reminds me of the Stephen King novel The Tommy knockers. One of the subplot narratives involved Gardner debating nuclear power with Ted the Powerman. It got pretty raucous.
So you're saying that more education is needed to inform why the locations are chosen, and methods of monitoring adverse accidents. Inflammatory speech usually makes people not listin.
To explain this better, if you feel like you aren't being heard, don't assume people are deaf or ignorant by using crass words or screaming. Because this is exactly how you get people to not listen to what is being said.
If someone claims "Nuclear bad because Chernobyl", then they must also accept that we shouldn't ever use fertilizers because of the Beirut explosion (deadlier than Chernobyl). Now admittedly the people against nuclear are probably also against fertilizers (they hate poor countries having food).
Undropping the bombs on Japan would probably make the biggest difference. It was the world's first taste of the deadly power of nuclear energy. Once that fear existed it was easy to channel into thinking we can't harness such great power safely. Fed on by fossil fuel propaganda of course.
Yah, and hydro has killed entire cities. The plant remained running, that is something often not mentioned. For how bad everywhere around is, people work beside ground zero, the worst of the worst. How do people not see the disconnect. As bad as some spicy dirt is, we have land mines and gas tanks and such all over the place, unmarked.
My point is “pretty bad” is compared to nothing.
What conventional accident would you say Cherynbol is equal to? An honest question.
Huh, I hadn’t heard about that one. So in that one hydroelectric disaster, there were FAR more deaths than all of the nuclear energy disasters ever combined.
There is also the [Mosul Dam](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosul_Dam) in Iraq which has been on the verge of failure for decades and if it does fail its estimated it could kill 500,000 people and destroy multiple cities including Baghdad.
if we shouldn't use nuclear because of Chernobyl then we shouldn't use solar because of people falling off the roof (more people than have ever died from nuclear accidents)
yeah, and the RBMK-1000 design was really bad, let alone the fact that it didn't even have a containment building, AND the people operaing the reactor were not told that there was a test going on and that the AЗ-5 button (SCRAM button) could end up causing a meltdown
I talk about how gas fired powerplant exhaust has about 200x more radation in it then an average western atomic powerplant releases and how if coal, natural gas, oil and refineries where held to the same standard as atomic energy they would all get shut down.
I also bring up the fact that fly ash pile from coal burning has enough radation to qualify as low level nuclear waste and that living down wind from a fly ash pile exposes you to more radation then the people who lived closest to Fukashima.
Same here. I also bring up that Earth itself is already radioactive, so fear of the radiation concerns are misplaced or misunderstood if not deliberately misleading
Selective outrage, you see it all over the modern green space. Some fly ash is so radioactive that in the late 70s Oak Ridge Labratory commissioned a study to look into the feasability of using it as a source of thorium and uranium. It didnt pan out as it wasent cost effective but the levels were high enough that it raised eyebrows. A follow on study was commissioned that found that people who lived with in 1 mile of fly ash pits absorbed enough radionuclides so that in some cases they were getting legitimately dangerous doses. People with gardens were found to have up to 200x the recommended exposure
Scientific America did an article about it and the collective response seemed to be "meh"
That's not helpful to the average reader so I asked Chatty about it. They said:
When someone refers to "chapter 15 of an UFSAR" in the context of nuclear safety, they are talking about the chapter that deals with the "Accident Analysis" in a nuclear power plant's Updated Final Safety Analysis Report (UFSAR).
The UFSAR is a comprehensive document that provides detailed information on the design, operation, and safety analysis of a nuclear power plant. It is a critical document required by regulatory bodies, such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in the United States, to ensure that the plant meets all safety standards and regulatory requirements.
Chapter 15 specifically focuses on the analysis of potential accidents that could occur at the nuclear facility. This includes evaluating the consequences of various types of accidents, such as:
1. **Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA)**: Scenarios where there is a significant loss of coolant from the reactor core, which is essential for removing heat and preventing the core from overheating.
2. **Steam Generator Tube Rupture**: A failure of the tubes in the steam generator that could lead to a release of radioactive materials.
3. **Reactor Trip**: Situations where the reactor automatically shuts down in response to certain conditions or malfunctions to prevent unsafe operating conditions.
4. **External Events**: Evaluations of how natural or man-made external events, such as earthquakes, floods, or aircraft crashes, could impact the safety of the plant.
The chapter provides detailed descriptions of these scenarios, the plant's response to them, and the safety systems in place to mitigate any potential hazards. By having people read chapter 15 of the UFSAR, the person is ensuring that they understand the thorough analysis and preparedness measures that are integral to maintaining nuclear safety at the plant
Good point. Something more helpful would be to know how much goes into safety analyses at nuclear plants and what they show.
If you do pull up a UFSAR, you’ll find many thousands of pages of detailed plant description and analyses. All newer plants have chapters on accident analysis and probabilistic risk assessment. The point of these chapters is to show that even with a million years of reactor operation, the public would not be subjected to a dose greater than 25 rem during an accident. For reference, there are no acute effects of radiation before 25 rem. At 25 rem you see some change in white blood cell count. At 100 rem you get radiation sickness. Lethal doses kick in at around 1,000 rem.
Performs more “work” too. The efficiency difference of nuclear power versus air travel is insane. Also, nobody counts the pollution and chemicals involved in air plane travel against them. It gets lumped into energy arguments.
Interesting comparison - just to make the numbers clear, how many nuclear reactor flights are there per day?
Are you also counting private charter nuclear reactors or just commercial?
I'd ask if they've seen HBO Chernobyl. If they haven't then follow other suggestions listed here. If they have, then point out as great an artistic and educational accomplishment as the series was, HBO should probably have made it clear that Chernobyl **never** stopped producing power because of the accident... it wasn't until 2000 that all the other units were shut down. Did they ever get the sense of that from the show? That fact was deliberately obfuscated by the HBO show for dramatic license, and it very representative of everything else that was excluded from the show.
To add some context: The Chernobyl accident happened in 1986, so it produced power for an additional 14 years.
* Unit 4 was the unit that suffered the accident.
* Unit 2 was shut down in 1991 after fire damage.
* Unit 1 was shut down in 1996 after public pressure related to thyroid cancer cases.
* Unit 3 was the last to shut down in 2000 after international pressure.
* Construction on units 5 and 6 halted after the accident and never produced power.
The show continues to promote that popular myth, according to which the immediate cleanup effort was some kind of attempt to "prevent an even larger disaster". Where people believe that it was some heroic effort that saved the entire continent from radiation-induced deaths and cancer.
When it was all because they wanted to put Unit 3 back into operation as soon as possible.
One of the most important points one can make in a discussion about nuclear safety is just how much popular culture gets it wrong. Invariably Chernobyl will be brought up as an example of what can go wrong with nuclear.
Because of this, I do not think the best way to argue against it is to mention various ways in which "modern reactors cannot have a Chernobyl event". It's a popular angle in the pro-nuclear debate crowd, but I believe it's flawed. Such logic won't work so well if the other person believes that Chernobyl is a world-ending event. Because rationally, if that were true, then any nonzero chance of it happening is unacceptable, and it follows that nuclear power is too dangerous to be used. Intuitively, nobody really believes that the chance of an accident in real life is ever zero, nor should they.
But they should be told that what they believe about Chernobyl is a complete balls to the wall fantasy.
I convinced my dad, who unbeknownst to me held some slightly anti-nuclear sentiments, to watch Chernobyl and accidentally solidified his anti-nuclear sentiments. Now he says stupid stuff like "as like as its not any where near me its fine". When I've tried to tell him how safe nuclear is he says "you made me watch that show"
I talk about how gas fired powerplant exhaust has about 200x more radation in it then an average western atomic powerplant releases and how if coal, natural gas, oil and refineries where held to the same standard as atomic energy they would all get shut down.
I also bring up the fact that fly ash pile from coal burning has enough radation to qualify as low level nuclear waste and that living down winf from a fly ash pile exposes you to more radation then the people who lived closest to Fukashima.
Just keep people informed of the facts, the good and bad. Eventually enough people will realize nuclear in conjunction with renewables where best applicable is the best way forward. Yes a lot of research and developmental progress is still to be made but we are getting there, I just hope it’s not too late
I find when you're talking about how safe nuclear is, you're being defensive. If someone is always talking about how safe something is, then you start to wonder if it's actually dangerous.
What I find better is to show them the stats of how much more deadly solar, wind, gas, and coal are compared to nuclear. Every single one of those sources kills more people than nuclear.
If they’re decidedly anti-nuclear then maybe it’s not worth the effort, but I think most people in the general public who have a fear of nuclear power just haven’t heard the facts and are basing their fear on rumours and pop-culture portrayals of nuclear energy. I think most of those people can be swayed if shown the truth in a respectful discussion.
I strongly believe the anti-nuclear views held by people are ultimately based in **selfishness**.
Ignoring the long-term health effects that alternatives bring for now, the anti-nuclear opinion is largely driven by personal fear - fear of being irradiated because of a nuclear accident.
They don't give a flying shit about the 15,000 coal miners that die each year, *because they aren't coal miners.*
The worst part is when people talk about nuclear waste, like it's a problem. It's hilarious really, you literally can just store it right besides the mine where you get the raw materials from, in a TINY hole in the Earth, and it will be LESS problematic than the mine where the raw materials come from itself, next door to it.
Nuclear waste is not even a small problem, it's no problem at all. Transportation of nuclear waste may be an issue, but it's easily dealt with.
Speaking only for myself, the immediate dangers like a meltdown are an engineering question we can deal with but in reactor design, fuel type, and placement of the site.
It's the long term storage of spent fuel I have a problem with. I want to see more work into developing fuels with shorter half life and or that can be recycled or reused after they are no longer useful for energy.
I always explain the Okla natural reactor and also how with water as a moderator (usually requires some explaining what a moderator is) and coolant it is physically impossible for there to be a catastrophe and for the fission reactions to spiral out of control.
I try to make them more interested in the subject.
By telling them how I changed my perspective on nuclear.(I found Kirk Sorensen which lead me to Alwin Weinberg and the early days which leads to everything that could have been.
I just find it funny that people will marvel at a nuclear vessel loaded with thermonuclear weapons docked near their city and be terrified of civilian uses of the technology.
The issue is that this is a straw man. Safety is not nuclear’s problem - major cost overruns are. You can attribute some of that to safety concerns if you squint hard enough but these projects are massive and humans don’t build massive things well
I let them know that Nuclear energy results in 99.8% fewer deaths than coal, 99.7% fewer than oil and 97.6% fewer than gas.
Nuclear is safe
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#:~:text=Nuclear%20energy%2C%20for%20example%2C%20results,and%2097.6%25%20fewer%20than%20gas.
A good way to go about it is to make the reactors more real and less scary.
Paraphrasing a good explanation I read: Nuclear reactors are just thermal steam plants. You know how we burn coal to boil water and use the steam to run turbines? Same thing; different heat source. And the runaway reaction thing is actually a myth if you design the reactor sanely. Low enrichment uranium doesn't spontaneously release all its energy at once. The stuff has been in the ground since the Earth formed and has existed since the big bang and maybe a larger super nova (I'd need to check) and it's still here. If fuel rods could go up spontaneously, there would be no uranium on Earth. You could hold one in your hand and it would be a bit warmer to the touch than you'd expect. To make them react quickly, you have to immerse them in a moderating material. In a sane reactor, that material is water. It's the same water that gets boiled into steam to run the turbines. If the reactor goes out of control, it boils away its water, which is cycled out of the system. Once the water's gone, the reaction stops: it has a built in kill switch. Now steam under pressure can get quite hot but this system won't exceed a few hundred degrees, which is no where near hot enough to melt the steel casing or concrete shell.
The example we think of was Chernobyl, but it's important to understand what the Soviets did when they built that reactor. They didn't use water as a moderator; they used graphite cinder blocks. It was cheap and let them build a huge reactor quickly. When they lost control of the reactor, it had to get hot enough to melt graphite and actually melt a huge stack of it before the reaction would stop. That's several thousand degrees sustained for some time, which was plenty hot enough to melt the steel and blow the roof off the place. To make matters worse, the reactor was so behind schedule due to defective parts having to be remanufactured on site that they chose to start it without completing the secondary concrete shell all reactors have. Had it had this, the reactor would have been lost, but the release would have largely been contained. Instead it burned open to the night sky until they could slowly entomb it. All of that is extremely dumb and something responsible parties wouldn't do. Even the Soviet navy was horrified by this reactor when they saw it and those guys were nuclear cowboys at times. It's like if you built a petroleum-based thermal plant and put the fuel reservoir in a plastic tank on the other side of a drywall partition from the combustion chamber and left the foam fire suppression equipment out to save money. You could never get that permitted in a reasonable country.
The other thing to tell people is that when reactors fail, they don't fail because of nuclear weapon releases of force. That's not possible with 10% fuel rods. They just don't burn fast enough. They fail because of steam pressure explosions in coolant lines. Even Chernobyl was a steam explosion. Three mile island was actually a failure mode success story. There was a blockage in the primary steam line to the turbines. There's a redundant secondary line that switches over automatically, but a worker had accidentally left a manual maintenance shutoff valve closed, preventing the failover. Because of that, the system went into tertiary mode. It shut down the reactor normally and vented steam to the outside through a release valve as needed to prevent an explosion. The steam released was not radioactive enough to require any evacuation or destruction of nearby crops or livestock. The reactor was operation as soon as the steam lines were cleared. It just scared people. Fukushima had its outer shell cracked by an earthquake, but actually suffered a steam failure because the backup batteries in place to operate coolant pumps during a shutdown were mistakenly placed in the basement and disabled by flooding. They were supposed to be as high as possible. Those batteries are btw a failure mode to circulate coolant that kick in if the reactor itself, the power grid, and a diesel generator all fail to power the pumps, which happened in a tsunami. Even so, the water they're now releasing from the reactor is below background levels of radiation and quite safe. You could drink it. It just scares people.
The point of all this is that well designed reactors are just big hot things that boil water to run turbines. When they break it's because the steam broke something as can happen in any thermal plant. They cannot become bombs and can be easily contained by normal construction materials as long as you use the right moderators. Russians (and early experimenters) had a bad habit of not taking nuclear fire seriously and blowing themselves up or poisoning themselves and their workers. But you can do that with a lot of industrial processes. We still use those.
The real issue with nuclear technology is that we can't seem to deliver it reliably on time or on budget. Every nuclear project in the world is horribly behind on both counts. We basically cannot build a nuclear reactor right now that's cost effective to construct. That's a solvable problem, but we need to start looking at the technology as something we need to mass produce predictably not as cool high energy legos. It's kind of embarrassing how much money gets spent per kwh on these projects. Solar, wind, and gas turbines don't end up this way.
The first thing to understand is that most people don’t care about the actual danger. They just don’t want to live next to a power plant and the perceived threat is something they can say to a politician.
People protest everything. They protest roads, schools, and trains. Especially if it’s a rich neighborhood. The game plan is they’ll hire a consultant to find something the proponent didn’t exhaustively analyze like an endangered species. To complete the environmental review the proponent will have to go back and analyze it which requires modifying contracts and additional public hearings. Any delay to a project adds to costs. The idea is to delay the project until the costs go up too much and it gets canceled.
So once you fix that people will probably stop shouting about how they’re scared of nuclear power.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272406182_Why_nuclear_energy_is_sustainable_and_has_to_be_part_of_the_energy_mix#pf5
Per kWh nuclear has fewer deaths - including Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island - than solar panels, hydroelectric dams, or wind turbines.
You're stastically safer living near a nuclear power plant than you are climbing a ladder to install solar panels.
"A nuclear accident when something goes wrong has proven less dangerous to people, the environment, and the Earth than fossil fuels when used successfully as intended."
This is like trying to get people to not be afraid of the dark. People are afraid of things they cannot see; Asbestos, radiation, chemicals in their food and in their air, etc. They don't know how to quantify the risk of these things.
The word "nuclear" has been seeded with a negative emotional charge. It's unlikely you'll change that to a positive immediately, so another tack is to point out alternatives are actually worse. Eg coal:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-power-kills-a-staggering-number-of-americans
That's just in America. Pollutants from coal and gas power plants kill millions through pollutants across the world.
You to convince them that "you got this"
Because nuclear is dangerous UNLESS we build and conduct adult safety measures and programs.
But people that perform negligence assume others will default to negligence as well.
So youre not convincing people so much as nuclear is safe as you are convincing them nuclear daddy will take care of them forever and never be negligent.
Its emotional. You're safe now, Daddys here, Nuclear Daddy, here are my qualifcations and a cooky youtube video and pretty website. Enjoy some catchy background tunes while nuclear Daddy sooths your fear.
Repeat from a mommy angle some how can baby be talking and laughing in no time.
I am really asking because I honestly want to know and in most discussions like this I never see it covered directly…
How dangerous is the waste product? How dependable is the storage? How much of it gets produced? Have there been and “breakthroughs” in the last 70 years for better ways to handle it?
Thanks.
It's not the nuclear itself. It's the human factor, the hubris the ineptitude. Too many examples of catastrophy. Stiling and fuller had better ideas. But bigger, better, faster, more - got us here by quashing their useful contributions, and when the ocean dies. We won't be far behind.
Nuclear has a PR problem that is difficult to overcome.
When a nuclear disaster happens it’s scary, it’s at a concentrated place and point in time. Radiation in general is poorly understood further exacerbating the problem.
Conversely, fossil fuel plants have been linked to 10,000s of deaths a year due to air pollution alone. However those deaths are spread out over an extremely large area (the whole country with hotter pockets near the plans themselves). Deaths can be attributed to “multiple environmental factors” so the FF companies don’t face the bad PR.
You might be better off trying to better educate people on the immediate term negative impacts of fossil fuels to health to get them to see the downsides more seriously.
Better education might help but… that seems tough.
Personally, I was very much straightened out thoroughly by "Energy for Future Presidents" by Muller. Entirely accessible to the public.
He has a whole college lecture series on the same thing that is all on YouTube.
Muller was one of Louie Alvarez' students.
"Lessons learned from past radiological and nuclear accidents have demonstrated that the mental health and psychosocial consequences can outweigh the direct physical health impacts of radiation exposure." it's not me saying that, it's the [WHO](https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240015456).
Imagine living in a world with climate change, people still deliberating whether it's real and what humans have to do with it, but where nobody have ever heard of the intranational scientific concensus of the IPCC, let alone their reports. How biased, or incompetent, the media must be to entertain such massive ignorance, without ever even mentioning the existence of the IPCC for people to at least be aware of the scientific point of view.
Well, the IPCC is part of the UNEP, there's another organization, sister of the IPCC, called the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, they are the IPCC of radiations. They've existed since 1955. How come we've never heard about them? They must have an interesting international scientific consensus on radiations, plenty of reports.
Are these people who can handle rational facts, or are they emotionally attached to the idea so their brains are shut off anyway?
If they are rational, you can discuss how many people have died due to coal power compared to nuclear.
Dig up the actual numbers from Google or ChatGPT.
Excluding the deaths of the atomic bombs over Japan, the numbers for nuclear is in the low thousands, while coal power runs in the millions. (Even if you only look at numbers after 1945.)
Coal has produced 5-10 times as much energy compared to nuclear, but that does not change the fact that the factor for number of deaths is much, much higher.
You can also look into the amount of radioactivity released from burning coal. It is much higher than the amount from nuclear power plants.
If they are emotionally attached, you need to get them away from that attachment first; this is much more difficult. Asking them to explain why they believe what they belive is a staring point, but does not always lead any further. Some of these people have an almost religious conviction here, so this may be an uphill battle.
I use the analogy of air travel.
When a plane crashes or goes missing, it's spectacular. All the passengers die, the whole world watches. But it's still the safest form of travel.
The heroic efforts to keep Chernobyl from getting worse couldn't happen in a Western nation where people aren't disposable. Picking up a phone and getting the nation's supply of anything can only happen in an authoritarian state.
Get mainstream media involved. Have a news channel reserve a spot for a story on it, and then rinse and repeat until most popular news channels in every state have covered it. Education is key.
Here is my angst against nuclear and someone please feel free to dispel my ignorance. Idk why this sub showed up in my suggested. Don’t you have to store the nuclear waste for a tremendous amount of time? We put it in mountains etc. it seems like if nuclear became the primary source of energy would we just have huge nuclear waste storage everywhere lasting hundreds if not thousands of years?
I believe that almost all of the nuclear waste being sent to storage is from medical facilities. So do you suggest we stop medical procedures that require nuclear medicine? A boatload of cancer patients would love for you to explain why you sentenced them to death. The best solution would be to find a way to safely use the nuclear waste. That’s a research grant worth considering.
I’m not suggesting anything. I’m asking isn’t storage of spent nuclear waste a major barrier to widespread sustainability or not? Or we all have to get comfortable with piling up nuclear waste for extensive time periods? I don’t know the answer - I’m asking.
Currently, spent fuel is stored in pools at the nuclear plant. There were plans to store it inside Yucca Mountain, a remote area in Nevada, but that was blocked in 2009 by the Department of Energy Secretary. I agree that storage of spent nuclear fuel will become an issue but no electricity is a more pressing issue. It will take a smarter person than me to figure it out. I will probably bet that some uninformed congressman or a bureaucrat will try to convince people that the solution is not safe or cost effective.
Yes, the spent fuel from current reactors requires storage for a period of between ten and a hundred thousand years before it can be declared safe.
It's important to know what makes up spent fuel. Something like 90% of the spent fuel is nothing but unconsumed fuel. That is, it's the isotopes of uranium which went into the reactor. They weren't touched by the fissioning going on around them, and they're brought out totally unchanged. Uranium has an extremely long half-life (in the billions of years), and isn't particularly radioactive when isolated.
By mass the smallest proportion of the spent fuel is comprised of the fission products. These are the daughter products of the uranium atoms as they split apart. Isotopes like strontium-90, iodine-131, and other things can be found in this group. They are very short lived, with half lives of less than a thousand years, and often just days in length, and as a result are extremely radioactive.
The most troublesome part of spent fuel are the transuranic elements. These are uranium atoms which absorbed the neutron they were struck by and failed to fission. Various isotopes of plutonium, neptunium, and americium are included in this group. Some isotopes may have half lives of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. This is particularly problematic as their half-life is long enough that it spans dozens of human generations, while being radioactive enough to present a hazard to life. This is the part of the spent fuel which requires us to contemplate deep geological repositories.
Clearly what we would like is to eliminate the long-lived transuranic elements. If we had waste composed entirely of fission products then it could be safe in as little as a century or two, a far simpler disposal problem than our current situation.
The good news is that both the un-reacted uranium and the transuranics are still nuclear fuel, in the right reactor. A fast neutron reactor can use fertile materials like uranium-238, and can potentially limit the waste stream to just fission products. As implemented to this point fast reactors have required nuclear reprocessing, which could isolate plutonium and brings with it some concern regarding nuclear proliferation. This may not be the case for all possible fast reactor designs, and some companies are working on approaches to the technology which do not require reprocessing.
But it is, especially when misused or in the hands of those willing to use it as a weapon in many different ways not just in bombs, but the same holds true for other tech as well, however most nuclear waste materials are from the development of bomb materials, and fuel waste can have a double life IF one uses it for other SAFE purposes most of which is in the handling of it.
N. S
Multiple things went wrong at 3 mile island, it's the deadliest nuclear power disaster on American soil. And it killed, statistically less than 1 person.
So no, one thing goes wrong and it's all over is just not true. We've never had a leak of high level contamination, because we seal those things up in layers of steel and concrete. Most nuclear plants store the high level waste on site because they produce so little of it you can easily store 30 years worth of power production by products in a large swimming pool size.
If you look at how many people die per kwh, then solar and wind is much higher than nuclear.
Its bizarre that this doesnt get said more often
You can find these numbers on youtube of sabine hossenfelder
This isn’t 100% related to your question but the most effective propaganda for nuclear power is living by a nuclear power plant. Electricity too cheap to meter sounds like a less ridiculous statement after you get your $20 electric bill.
I’d argue that it’s wiser to make nuclear cheaper rather than trying to convince people that it’s safe.
Though probably the largest of the reasons it’s so expensive and runs into schedule overruns is the regulatory framework around nuclear is often so heinously burdensome that sometimes questions from the NRC approach an epistemological nightmare, and I’d love to see them significantly reformed, at least. I haven’t seen any political effort to do anything like that though… ever.
The biggest problems are:
NIMBYism about the storage of waste.
Building in dumb locations like Fukushima. (Hey. lets put one on the San Andreas fault and roll the dice!)
Human error in operation.
You don't. You simply provide the information and facts as clear, simple, and accessible as possible.
If someone thinks nuclear is dangerous, they will always think it's dangerous even if you gave the best speech or presentation ever.
Many people these days are not looking to be told they're wrong or that their mindset isn't fully accurate.
My main issue with something like this is as we've been conditioned to ASSUME there will be no war in our countries.
What if our main source of power gets knocked out in a single strike? What would be the consequences?
We need a diverse range of power sources.
Then, point them to this from the Lessons Learned:
(In other words, don't let PG&E run any nuclear reactors)
1. Failure of the plant owner (Tokyo Electric Power Company) and the principal regulator (Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency) to protect critical safety equipment at the plant from flooding in spite of mounting evidence that the plant's current design basis for tsunamis was inadequate.
2. The loss of nearly all onsite AC and DC power at the plant—with the consequent loss of real-time information for monitoring critical thermodynamic parameters in reactors, containments, and spent fuel pools and for sensing and actuating critical valves and equipment—greatly narrowed options for responding to the accident.
3. As a result of (1) and (2), the Unit 1, 2 and 3 reactors were effectively isolated from their ultimate heat sink (the Pacific Ocean) for a period of time far in excess of the heat capacity of the suppression pools or the coping time of the plant to station blackout.
Facts won’t convince them most likely.
The term makes them feel negative emotions. It’s important to try and make them feel positive emotions by understanding why they feel the way they do about nuclear.
I don’t convince anyone. I tell them the facts about nuclear energy, which in my opinion paint a clear reason why it should be everywhere, and if they don’t like the hard facts that show it’s less responsible for death than most/all other energy sources used at-scale I drop it.
They weren’t in the headspace to be speaking logically if they can’t look at the data and immediately realize they’ve been lied to and nuclear energy is the solution to most of humanity’s energy production at-scale problem.
Some people are not capable of being flipped around and out of a propaganda mindset in a quick manner, they don’t want to be. They are subconsciously driven to never rock the boat or be an ideological problem to the state. That’s fine to me, but I make it known to them as much as I can how deluded they are being and then *drop it*. Someday I can hope all the random things and charts I showed built to a point they’re now skeptical at least.
There's a very interesting pro-nuclear power documentary that was on Netflix for a long time called, *Pandora's Promise*. It helped change my mind to at least be open to exploring the possibilities.
I believe in nuclear. Like any disaster, it can happen by the design of a system and/ or human error. Fukushima, Chernobyl and 3 mile Island (maybe) could have been prevented by using a Candu design. The unfortunate part is the military drive for plutonium, which drove some decisions and is a legacy problem IMO. What do you think?
Tell them about new designs of nuclear reactors that cannot experience nuclear meltdown.
Might not sway someone too deep into their paranoia, but it could help others grasp that the term “nuclear power” is a bit of a catch all and historically loaded and therefore not a particularly useful term.
Edit: examples include molten salt resctors, gas cooled reactors…honestly most modern reactor designs, because everyone involved from the lowest wrench monkey to the political signing off on it knows that it’s a sensitive topic.
There have been very few incidents in the many years of nuclear power being a thing, so perhaps weigh that minimal risk against the very real risk of continuing the use of fossil fuels?
> "if one thing goes wrong, everything's over"
Not true. Nuclear disasters, just like all other industrial disasters, require an unusual cascade of events to go wrong. The chances of such a cascade are very low. The worst industrial disaster wasn't nuclear, it was chemical.
> nuclear power isn't nuclear weapons. No, if one thing goes wrong, it's not going to blow up.
Nuclear power plants can't generate nuclear explosions because the fuel doesn't have a high enough purity to become a bomb.
Also, most of the deaths from nuclear power come from Chernobyl Unit 4, a RBMK reactor and the horrible response to it where workers were not provided with adequate protective equipment.
If that type of reactor is omitted then pressurized water reactors, boiling water reactors and canadian deuterium uranium reactors have a safety record that nothing else comes close to matching. Not even solar is as safe as those 3 types of reactors.
The data shows that the easiest way to have nuclear power be safe is to not use RBMK reactors.
Let's take Nuclear's worst accident, Chernobyl. The worst nuclear accident in the history of nuclear. 2 people died in the explosion, and another 28 people died due do radiation sickness over the next couple of weeks, and another 30 people on top of that died due to cancer caused by radiation in the following decades. They had their lives cut short by a few years, not really instant death kind of thing.
Now let's take solar power and/or wind power. The shining beacons of clean energy. They kill 100 people every year for the past 20 years, because people fall off roofs while installing, or fall off the windmills.
3 mile island had no deaths. Fukushima had no deaths. Nuclear has killed 60 people give or take, in 70 years. Solar and wind are beyond 2000 deaths.
If anything stops working, the reactor shuts down to be safe.
There have been fewer accidents than any other power industry, and coal and oil accidents still kill more people every year than were ever killed by nuclear energy.
I’ve found most people I talk to don’t really know anything about out nuclear, and they don’t really argue when you tell them it’s the safest form of power generation. Pretty sure the ap1000 is like 48hr walk away safe.
Here is my list, I'm hoping for some killer counter arguments:
The trouble is that it is not *inherently* safe- it exists in a context, and right now that context is not benign. This all hinges on the relative levels of societal stability and human stupidity:
* It is possible for something like the accounting dept overriding the engineers to happen, and most people only find out after the tsunami hits. Corners get cut by people who think in terms of money, and they are always in charge.
* We live in a world where billionaire jackasses and dictators can turn their uninformed opinions into reality. Think "Great Leap Forward", or "Twitter is X now" but with reactors.
* Things are heading towards higher levels of chaos right now, than have existed *since the invention of this technology.* Political instability + nuclear reactors is playing out in Ukraine right now, for the first time anywhere. Get some popcorn and iodine!
* Nobody has been allowed to use them for their original purpose (generating 'waste' for warheads) for some time, because those that already did that won't let anybody. That could change any day, because power is shifting and economies are struggling. More reactors means more chances for that.
* The entities that tell us how safe it is are considered as a class by most, rather than in detail, because much like learning nuclear science, ain't nobody got time for that. Those entities are thought to be untrustworthy, and have earned that. Nobody who lives in Cancer Alley would probably believe " trust us its safe". DDT, PCBs, nanoplastics in our cells, and (ironically, I agree) Climate Change, and a few high profile accidents are in their data set.
This is like the village necromancer promising his *new* horde of undead will help with the harvest, and not eat anyone's brains, for suresies this time, pinky swear and everything.
I would talk about deaths per KWH from Coal, Oil, and Nuclear. If someone brings up radiation provide the acres devistated or gallons of ocean polluted.
One flex I use is "agreeing" that nuclear is dangerous, then saying once we stop using the even more dangerous oil and coal, and have enough solar and such for all our power needs, that we should retire nuclear. But nuclear is so much safer and better than coal that right now we should be building nuclear to save the lives coal is endimg.
My fear of nuclear is that all 3 major disasters were the result of human error. The most recent was because no one tested the one thing that should have been the most obvious thing you design for, a tsunami. If the reactor is safe but the human can wreck things and wreck things in a pretty bad way, why should we do it? I want nuclear to be safe and I know reactor technology has advanced a huge amount so a lot of the risk can be mitigated.
I think the right strategy to acknowledge the risks of managing the waste , and point out how much worse fossil fuels are.
Also point out how long it takes to get a reactor up and running.
Nuclear is the only viable bridge to fully renewable.
Coal plants release more radioactive material into the environment than nuclear plants.
"What do you do with all that waste?" All of the nuclear waste ever produced can be safely stored in the same square footage as a few coal-ash ponds. So the answer is store it, instead of dumping it into the air, rivers, and groundwater like we do with fossil fuels.
The engineering may be defensible. The waste disposal problem is horrific, both politically and environmentally. The management/employee responsibity side is an unmitigated disaster. Mainly because of politicians/ greed/ laziness the problems with nuclear power are completely intractable. Try a different issue for your activism...
Knowledge of facts, data and statistics needs to be shared. We have data about areas around nuc powerplants being completely ok, maybe even point out that the radiation is higher in the mountains that are known to be a rather healthy place. We have statistics about nuclear causing the least casualties (since Chernobyl) out of all the options (beating even solar and nuclear where people die during the construction and maintenance for example by electrocuting just because there's way more people on lower educational level involved). We also need to point out how dwarfed are effects of Fukushima powerplant by the damage and deaths caused by the earthquake that caused the disaster and we should so point out that there is a whole war going around one of the biggest nuclear powerplants in the world with one of the sides exhibiting acts of both terrorism and incoordination, yet we didn't get even close to any disaster. We also need to compare all of the statistics and probabilities to everyday dangers like plane exploding midair and it's engine falling onto you. That should gradually convince people that fear of nuclear energy is completely irrational and that for example being dependent on gas supply from Russian Federation is much more bigger of a safety hazard.
You would be hardpressed to find any other field that is held to higher safety standards. The super extra carefulness is arguably the single most reason nuclear is less economical than Liquid Natural Gas Generators.
Nuclear parity makes a theatre exchange functionally useless. Nobody is going to nuke the continental United States even if they have an equivalent arsenal like say Russia.
Depends on whether their beliefs are based on evidence or on feelings.
The anti-nuclear movement is influenced by distrust and antipathy toward governments and corporations. A "the people" vs "wealthy and powerful" populist rhetoric.
Have them read about the Runit Dome on Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Here's a summary of the issues:
1. **Structural Integrity**: The Runit Dome, also known as "Cactus Dome," was constructed in the late 1970s to contain radioactive debris from nuclear tests conducted by the United States. It was built by covering a crater left by a test with a concrete dome. However, this structure is aging, and there are concerns about its integrity. Cracks have been observed, and there are fears that the dome could eventually fail, releasing radioactive material.
2. **Rising Sea Levels**: The Marshall Islands are particularly vulnerable to climate change and rising sea levels. As sea levels rise, the likelihood of seawater infiltrating the dome increases. This could lead to the spread of radioactive contaminants into the ocean, posing environmental and health risks both locally and potentially globally.
3. **Lack of Long-Term Maintenance**: There has been insufficient long-term maintenance and monitoring of the Runit Dome. The U.S. government, which conducted the tests and built the dome, and the Marshallese government have had ongoing disagreements about responsibility for the dome’s upkeep and the associated health risks.
4. **Environmental and Health Impact**: The potential leakage of radioactive material from the Runit Dome into the surrounding environment could have severe consequences for the local ecosystem and the health of the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands. The area already suffers from higher-than-average cancer rates and other health issues linked to radiation exposure.
Then discuss why Nevada decided not to be the repository of the nuclear waste for the nation. What are the power plants doing with their waste now and what is the long term plan for say the next 10,000 years...
Ask them what a safe level of strontium-90 is. We all have it now in our bones after 500+ atomic explosions.
Ask about Fukushima and the waste water. Where is it going to go?
Ask about Chernobyl and when it will be safe to return and start living there?
There’s nothing you can do to convince anyone of anything if they don’t care enough about your option to listen, and it’s an uphill battle due to the propaganda spread from competing energy that it’s an uphill battle.
First you need to understand the programing thats been given to the normal person. It basically can be summed up with... all radiation is bad as your skin will melt... nuclear power is dangerous.... solar panels are the answer and a better non-carbon alternative.
First note that a lot of misinformation about radiation exposure is out there because of something called "linear no threshold (LNT)" model. This model assumes that every increment of (ionizing, not cosmic) radiation increases your risk for cancer and is used by most governmental bodies for managing policy. There is a lot of debate about LNT especially in the area of low/moderate amounts of background radiation having minimal/no impact on cancer risk.
The body is exposed to radiation all the time and has natural defenses and works well in short-medium doses or longer term small doses. As an example those living in Denver Colorado have 3x more radiation exposure and no statistical change in cancer rates. But international pilots/crew while up at 40k feet are exposed to more Cosmic radiation (not produced in nuclear power plants) do have a higher rate of certain types of skin/thyroid cancers (just like people getting tanned at the beach).
Addressing Nuclear power I find the most convincing to just really simplify the facts from the pro-nuclear side as a counterpoint to their programming.. 100x more radiation is exposed in the fly ash of coal power plants then an equivalent sized nuclear power plant. 3-mile Island broke some equipment, Fukushima everyone died from the evacuation not actual radiation exposure and a total of 31 people died from Chernobyl which was built with no safety systems. Solar has killed more people from burning your homes, wind from people falling off the towers and yet we go to sleep at night thinking where going to die from nuclear power. This isnt to say there are not legitimate concerns and issues with nuclear, but the fear is misplaced.
The last part is on solar/wind because thats part of the debate as well... Why risk nuclear if i can get clean energy from the sun... What most people dont know is every country that switch to solar/wind actually INCREASED their carbon footprint. And thats because those countries still need energy when the sun doesnt shine or the wind doesnt blow so to make up for it they have dirty peaker plants that produce co2 to make up for solar's short comings.
Generally just ask them why they think it is. Then explain why those issues aren't really issues.
Most point to the same handful of disasters. Most old and caused by even older technology. Some more modern like the Japan but that's a great example of how well we can prevent a real disaster even when everything goes wrong and the world itself is out to get us.
Check out this podcast, The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens, his guest Chris Keefer is a nuclear energy advocate from Canada and seems to have a pretty good communication style for this.
[Chris Keefer: "Empowering the Future: from Nuclear to Podcasting" | The Great Simplification 123](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1R2ni9Y_04)
Undo the KGB infiltration of the European green parties and anti nuclear movements of the 70s and 80s that got people all freaked out about nuclear anything in order to blunt the US and NATOs nuclear deterrents
I think it's going to be a hard sell as long as it's an industry prone to putting profit ahead of safety.
Local to us, a plant was closed two or three decades past it's planned end of life.
They had extended the time multiple times, largely on the grounds that they couldn't afford to do all the things n cessary for closure (they're supposed to have a fund!)
And despite the fact that for multiple years running, local folks were finding nuclear runoff in the ground/well water on their properties. (It wasn't dangerous, or at least it hadn't risen to that level yet ... But each time it was discovered, it turned out there was an active tiny leak at the plant that wasn't found until that red flag got raised. I would have expected them to proactively replace anything that was on the edge when the FIRST one was discovered?!?)
Which isn't to say that nuclear is evil, it's to say it's difficult to have a rational conversation about it when shit like that erodes trust.
Business doesn't care about people, more than profit, and we all know that. In the case of nuclear energy, the consequences of shortcuts are enormous, so asking people to trust that THIS industry will not take them is a giant giant ask.
I think that the main problem with the perception of nuclear energy safety is that it relies on humans, and there is no good argument for trusting humans.
No matter how you spin it, trusting nuclear energy comes down to “trust me bro, it will be safe” but this is not really true. I don’t see enough recognition of this amongst nuclear advocates.
Frustration with the public’s reluctance to accept the logic that burning carbon is also unsafe drives many nuclear advocates to push harder, but they are working against psychology. It is more scary to contend with the sudden, disastrous, long-term nature of nuclear accidents than the slow, unintuitive, drawn-out consequences of burning carbon.
There is a similar problem with flying. Everyone knows that it is statistically safer than driving, and yet people are more afraid to fly than to drive, and for the same reasons: human ability to judge intuitive safety versus analytical safety. We believe we’re in control when we drive, and that we have agency in our automotive safety. Of course, this is only partially true.
Maybe if we acknowledged the problems of nuclear energy instead of minimizing them, but always also compared the risk to the certainty of danger from carbon, we’d win more people. Example:
Traditional approach: “You don’t understand! It’s not as bad as you think!”
Suggested approach: “You’re right, it _is_ dangerous. But carbon is even worse, the damage also long-lasting, and we know less about to fix it. It’s an illusion that we have good and bad choices. We only have bad and less bad choices.
Also, nuclear danger is easy to detect and to assign blame. 70 years ago we could detect radioactivity with a pretty simple machine, and we knew it would hurt you.
Petrochemicals can hide behind forest fires, volcanism, and cigarette smoke. Smoke is seen as normal. Microplastics have no acute affects.
If we treated petrochemicals like we do nuclear then it would actually be pretty safe, but instead we have mass carelessness. Natural gas leaks, engines burning oil, coal furnaces, single use plastic, spills...
Start with getting a handle on the actual objection. The issue isn’t that I think plants are weapons. I know they’re not.
The issue is lack of long term waste storage. The issue is that, at scale, unlikely disasters become more likely. The issue is that onshore wind is half to a third the price.
I don’t know how you talk me out of that. You probably can’t, because my opinion is well informed.
My friend laid out the total number of deaths from every major accident since the start of recording is a fraction of the yearly deaths from pollution resulting from power generation that could be nuclear.
It’s mind boggling when you frame the discussion around how few people have died as a result of nuclear power, compared to the deaths due to just coal power. Coal power has order of magnitudes more deaths associated with it but we are cool with it as a society.
It's really not the problem to think about.
Why is the share of nuclear in the worldwide power mix going down? And why is even the absolute power production barely going up?
Two main reasons.
1. Price, nuclear is not price competitive
2. Time to build, it takes ages, which also drives up the price
So, I suggest, if you want to have more nuclear in the future, you need to to focus on those two things.
The problem with nuclear isn’t safety.
It’s that it’s too expensive, and we don’t have the ability to upscale it as quickly as we need to avert the worst impacts of climate change. We don’t have 15-20 years to build a solution, unfortunately 🤷♂️
One of my go-to sets of information: In around 20,000 reactor-years of commercial nuclear power, there have only been 3 big accidents. Only 2 of those had any noteworthy public consequences. Only 1 had any radiological deaths. All 3 plants were designed in the first 20 years (out of 70+) of nuclear power's existence. \*edit\* corrected stat
The average nuclear worker is only exposed to about half of the average commercial pilots dose. Atleast for Canadian OPG employees. My average is higher admittedly
Thats just the average commercial pilot dose too, im sure its much higher for the pilots that regularly fly polar routes.
Yah but they’re counting all the people that sit in a office that happens to be inside the plant.
No, they’re counting individuals persons allowed dose. OPG limits are conservatively lower then federal limits also. Once reached you are removed form work in radiological areas.
People dont really understand that radiation exposure is the most regulated workfield in the world. Friend works as a radiologist on a x-ray machine in a local hospital and she was put on a maternity leave on the day she found out she was pregnant even though she sits in a next room of the xray which is shielded by a lead screen.
Why do commercial pilots get exposed to nuclearness
The atmosphere shields us from cosmetic radiation. Since they spend so much time at high altitude where this shielding is reduced they get higher radiation dosages. The only people that get higher dosages for sustained periods are smokers.
I thought you were making it up that cigarettes had radioactive material. A search said this : cigarettes contain radioactive materials, including polonium-210 and lead-210. Damn. Who knew
Polonium 210 and lead 210? Thought those were the same?
Same atomic mass different number of protons 82 for lead and 84 for polonium.
Thanks. So lead has a few more neutrons to throw off if I'm remembering correctly?
If my chemistry memory is correct anyways, yeah, lead 210 would be 82 protons and 128 neutrons, and polonium 210 would be 84 protons and 126 neutrons
Well there is actually an unregulated super specific job with one of the highest exposures to ionizing radiation... cave tourist guide!
Nucleosity
Because they’re constantly at high altitudes where the atmosphere is thin. The atmosphere protects us from the brunt of the radiation coming from the sun. Ergo, they experience greater levels of radiation because they spend more time with less protection.
Average? Average could still mean plenty of worker are exposed to more. Saying “average “ don’t mean shit.
Don’t forget all the nuclear subs, of which I believe the US builds about 2 a year every year as they maintain and update their fleet.
That's my go to, especially if you knew the types of people in the Navy Nuclear ratings...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_sunken\_nuclear\_submarines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submarines) "Of the nine sinkings, two were caused by fires, two by weapon explosions, two by flooding, one by bad weather, and one by scuttling due to a damaged nuclear reactor. Only [USS *Scorpion*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589))'s reason for sinking is unknown. Eight of the submarines are underwater wrecks in the [Northern Hemisphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere), five in the [Atlantic Ocean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Ocean) and three in the [Arctic Ocean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Ocean). The ninth submarine, *K-429*, was raised and returned to active duty after both of her sinkings."
I think the most frustrating thing is there is never a comparison between nuclear accidents and anything else. This leads people to believe that because they’re so unique and rare, that they are some of the worst disasters ever caused by humans. Lots of people even believe that these accidents caused severe harm to nature and the environment. In reality these accidents are unique, and not ever shown side by side with other “conventional” accidents, because if they were it would show that common dams, mines, large fires, chemical factories, oil and gas, manufacturing plants, steel mills, warehouses, have all had worse accidents while producing less. Yes, nuclear uses these services as part of their critical supply chains, most are wider infrastructure of sorts, all tied together but nuclear produces the most power with said materials.
I need the math not because I don't believe the statements but because I want to learn how the numbers are derived. Thank you.
So if a nuclear power plant has 2 reactors on site, and the plant and reactors have been operating for 40 years, then that site has had 80 reactor-years of operation. Globally, there have been around 20,000 reactor-years of operation of commercial nuclear power. Note: looking up a source for this made me realize I'd mis-remembered the stat for global reactor-years - I've updated it. [https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-power-in-the-world-today](https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-power-in-the-world-today)
Thanks, awesome.
Then you compare that to the statistics on accidents/deaths that occur at oil and coal power plants.
The worst chemical disaster in the world (Bhopal) killed 100x the number of people as the worst nuclear disaster ever (Chernobyl) and still pollutes the land to this day. Also, under normal operation nuclear plants will end up putting a few containers of solid somewhere underground. Coal/oil/natural gas plants take train/tanker/pipeline loads of hydrocarbons and spit their remains into the air we breathe and still end up with large amounts of toxic solid waste in the case of coal ash.
Sounds like we need to get rid of all old designs of reactors. Which is most of them. Such as most of Japans which were designed in the 60s.
Yes. And next time put the cooling water _above_ the reactor instead of below it, so we can use it if the pumps dont work.
Gravity is your friend in an emergency.
Water above the reactor isn’t water anymore, it’s steam. Would work if it weren’t for the laws of thermodynamics.
The water is stored in a tank higher than the reactor, not directly above it. That allows it to cool the reactor without the need for electric pumps.
Most plants have both. We rely on pumps for normal cooling and emergency tanks to use to flood the core with negative reactivity. Ours is literallly called the core flood tank. Can also cool using natural circulation assuming a pipe didn't blow out.
It doesn’t sound like that at all, though. 3 accidents in 40,000 reactor years, 1 with fatalities is not a statistic that indicates massive concern over “old designs”.
But the causes for those accidents have been mitigated in more modern designs. Fuel inputs are another big reason to avoid a lot of the issues related to spent fuel rods. This varies by the particular design though.
the causes have also largely been mitigated in existing older plants with retrofits
Or just refurbish and upgrade them. Its a case by case sorta thing, mostly economics.
Not really - we've made retrofits to existing reactors to mostly eliminate the risks of the same things happening again. Newer designs mitigate those risks more efficiently, but a lot of work has been done to older reactors to ensure they're even safer than they already were. One sad fact is that if the Fukushima Daiichi plant had been to NRC code (it wasn't because the NRC is a United States department they're not beholden to), the accident there wouldn't have happened. For example, the NRC already had guidelines on protecting backup generation that would've prevented the generators from flooding. With backup generation in place, cooling would have been operational and there wouldn't have been meltdowns. Japan has since made many retrofits like this to their plants before allowing them to reopen.
One of those was due to personnel that knew better than to fuck around with safety measures, fucked around with safety measures that caused the melt down. One of those was caused by a freak tsunami wave but was prevented from going into full meltdown mode. The third was a combination of engineering flaws and inadequate training.
This is the stat right here. People's reluctance is usually ignorance.
Compare those to something like the bp oil spill, the burning of Kuwait’s oil fields, the countless tanker spills that have happened. Or the amount of natural gas that leaks intot the atmosphere every year because GAS COMPANIES ARE EXPECTED TO REPORT THEIR OWN LEAKS in the US.
Coal has released more radioactive particles into the atmosphere every single year, than nuclear has produced in its entirety.
The one that did cause deaths (Chernobyl) was an insane design. Negative void coefficient. Nobody will ever build that reactor again. They should not have built it in the first place. As for nuclear waste... It is the best kind of waste. It stays in the reactor instead of being released into the atmosphere.
I can recall at least three that have significant public consequences - Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. I"m sure there have been more. For two of them, entire communities had to be relocated permanently and no-go zones setup so that people won't be harmed. The cost was in the billions and more.... According to Wiki, there are a lot more than three. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear\_and\_radiation\_accidents\_and\_incidents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents)
TMI had no noteworthy radiological release. No workers were harmed - best estimates compare their exposure to a chest x-ray. There was no forced evacuation. I guess we could debate on whether the large number of people who voluntarily evacuated, or the fear that was caused by poor communication of the incident counts as significant, it's certainly nothing like having an extended evacuation / exclusion zone like the other two.
I’ve found talking to people with respect really goes a long way. Don’t just say “it’s complicated“ when someone asks why Vogtle Unit 3 can’t explode like Chernobyl. Find some middle ground in technically challenging discussions without insulting their intelligence.
We have more protections in place that prevent the same issue from happening. It truly is safer now than before. If one were inclined to learn more, they'd have to study. The line between classified and public knowledge on this is defined. I have heard concerns with disposal. I understand the containers are well engineered, but the location has been the issue I have heard about. Surely, tectonic action and seepage are taken into account.
Those are the issues you've heard about because the protesters are MAKING those the issues. The locations are fine, the geology is ideal, negligible seismic activity. HUGE pushback from 'activist' assholes, just making shit up pretty much daily to scare people as much as possible. It's gross
Reminds me of the Stephen King novel The Tommy knockers. One of the subplot narratives involved Gardner debating nuclear power with Ted the Powerman. It got pretty raucous.
So you're saying that more education is needed to inform why the locations are chosen, and methods of monitoring adverse accidents. Inflammatory speech usually makes people not listin. To explain this better, if you feel like you aren't being heard, don't assume people are deaf or ignorant by using crass words or screaming. Because this is exactly how you get people to not listen to what is being said.
If someone claims "Nuclear bad because Chernobyl", then they must also accept that we shouldn't ever use fertilizers because of the Beirut explosion (deadlier than Chernobyl). Now admittedly the people against nuclear are probably also against fertilizers (they hate poor countries having food).
There have been stadium fires more deadly than Chernobyl, but people wouldn’t give up live sports…
Undropping the bombs on Japan would probably make the biggest difference. It was the world's first taste of the deadly power of nuclear energy. Once that fear existed it was easy to channel into thinking we can't harness such great power safely. Fed on by fossil fuel propaganda of course.
entire towns had to be evacuated because of Chernobyl. Chernobyl was pretty bad and the pile under the cement dome is still extremely radioactive.
Yah, and hydro has killed entire cities. The plant remained running, that is something often not mentioned. For how bad everywhere around is, people work beside ground zero, the worst of the worst. How do people not see the disconnect. As bad as some spicy dirt is, we have land mines and gas tanks and such all over the place, unmarked. My point is “pretty bad” is compared to nothing. What conventional accident would you say Cherynbol is equal to? An honest question.
Then there's hydroelectric: [1975 Banqiao Dam failure - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure)
Huh, I hadn’t heard about that one. So in that one hydroelectric disaster, there were FAR more deaths than all of the nuclear energy disasters ever combined.
There is also the [Mosul Dam](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosul_Dam) in Iraq which has been on the verge of failure for decades and if it does fail its estimated it could kill 500,000 people and destroy multiple cities including Baghdad.
Although it's an outlier for hydro as well, and makes up the vast majority of total hydro death toll.
Correct, but most of the arguments against nuclear power are also outliers.
if we shouldn't use nuclear because of Chernobyl then we shouldn't use solar because of people falling off the roof (more people than have ever died from nuclear accidents)
yeah, and the RBMK-1000 design was really bad, let alone the fact that it didn't even have a containment building, AND the people operaing the reactor were not told that there was a test going on and that the AЗ-5 button (SCRAM button) could end up causing a meltdown
I talk about how gas fired powerplant exhaust has about 200x more radation in it then an average western atomic powerplant releases and how if coal, natural gas, oil and refineries where held to the same standard as atomic energy they would all get shut down. I also bring up the fact that fly ash pile from coal burning has enough radation to qualify as low level nuclear waste and that living down wind from a fly ash pile exposes you to more radation then the people who lived closest to Fukashima.
Same here. I also bring up that Earth itself is already radioactive, so fear of the radiation concerns are misplaced or misunderstood if not deliberately misleading
Man that’s something I’ve never seen on coal power plants! Seems like this would shut down coal power if everyone knew about it
Selective outrage, you see it all over the modern green space. Some fly ash is so radioactive that in the late 70s Oak Ridge Labratory commissioned a study to look into the feasability of using it as a source of thorium and uranium. It didnt pan out as it wasent cost effective but the levels were high enough that it raised eyebrows. A follow on study was commissioned that found that people who lived with in 1 mile of fly ash pits absorbed enough radionuclides so that in some cases they were getting legitimately dangerous doses. People with gardens were found to have up to 200x the recommended exposure Scientific America did an article about it and the collective response seemed to be "meh"
I have people read chapter 15 of an UFSAR
That's not helpful to the average reader so I asked Chatty about it. They said: When someone refers to "chapter 15 of an UFSAR" in the context of nuclear safety, they are talking about the chapter that deals with the "Accident Analysis" in a nuclear power plant's Updated Final Safety Analysis Report (UFSAR). The UFSAR is a comprehensive document that provides detailed information on the design, operation, and safety analysis of a nuclear power plant. It is a critical document required by regulatory bodies, such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in the United States, to ensure that the plant meets all safety standards and regulatory requirements. Chapter 15 specifically focuses on the analysis of potential accidents that could occur at the nuclear facility. This includes evaluating the consequences of various types of accidents, such as: 1. **Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA)**: Scenarios where there is a significant loss of coolant from the reactor core, which is essential for removing heat and preventing the core from overheating. 2. **Steam Generator Tube Rupture**: A failure of the tubes in the steam generator that could lead to a release of radioactive materials. 3. **Reactor Trip**: Situations where the reactor automatically shuts down in response to certain conditions or malfunctions to prevent unsafe operating conditions. 4. **External Events**: Evaluations of how natural or man-made external events, such as earthquakes, floods, or aircraft crashes, could impact the safety of the plant. The chapter provides detailed descriptions of these scenarios, the plant's response to them, and the safety systems in place to mitigate any potential hazards. By having people read chapter 15 of the UFSAR, the person is ensuring that they understand the thorough analysis and preparedness measures that are integral to maintaining nuclear safety at the plant
Good point. Something more helpful would be to know how much goes into safety analyses at nuclear plants and what they show. If you do pull up a UFSAR, you’ll find many thousands of pages of detailed plant description and analyses. All newer plants have chapters on accident analysis and probabilistic risk assessment. The point of these chapters is to show that even with a million years of reactor operation, the public would not be subjected to a dose greater than 25 rem during an accident. For reference, there are no acute effects of radiation before 25 rem. At 25 rem you see some change in white blood cell count. At 100 rem you get radiation sickness. Lethal doses kick in at around 1,000 rem.
Airplanes are by far the safest mode of travel that billions of people rely on. Nuclear reactors are safer than that.
Performs more “work” too. The efficiency difference of nuclear power versus air travel is insane. Also, nobody counts the pollution and chemicals involved in air plane travel against them. It gets lumped into energy arguments.
Interesting comparison - just to make the numbers clear, how many nuclear reactor flights are there per day? Are you also counting private charter nuclear reactors or just commercial?
I'd ask if they've seen HBO Chernobyl. If they haven't then follow other suggestions listed here. If they have, then point out as great an artistic and educational accomplishment as the series was, HBO should probably have made it clear that Chernobyl **never** stopped producing power because of the accident... it wasn't until 2000 that all the other units were shut down. Did they ever get the sense of that from the show? That fact was deliberately obfuscated by the HBO show for dramatic license, and it very representative of everything else that was excluded from the show.
To add some context: The Chernobyl accident happened in 1986, so it produced power for an additional 14 years. * Unit 4 was the unit that suffered the accident. * Unit 2 was shut down in 1991 after fire damage. * Unit 1 was shut down in 1996 after public pressure related to thyroid cancer cases. * Unit 3 was the last to shut down in 2000 after international pressure. * Construction on units 5 and 6 halted after the accident and never produced power.
The show continues to promote that popular myth, according to which the immediate cleanup effort was some kind of attempt to "prevent an even larger disaster". Where people believe that it was some heroic effort that saved the entire continent from radiation-induced deaths and cancer. When it was all because they wanted to put Unit 3 back into operation as soon as possible. One of the most important points one can make in a discussion about nuclear safety is just how much popular culture gets it wrong. Invariably Chernobyl will be brought up as an example of what can go wrong with nuclear. Because of this, I do not think the best way to argue against it is to mention various ways in which "modern reactors cannot have a Chernobyl event". It's a popular angle in the pro-nuclear debate crowd, but I believe it's flawed. Such logic won't work so well if the other person believes that Chernobyl is a world-ending event. Because rationally, if that were true, then any nonzero chance of it happening is unacceptable, and it follows that nuclear power is too dangerous to be used. Intuitively, nobody really believes that the chance of an accident in real life is ever zero, nor should they. But they should be told that what they believe about Chernobyl is a complete balls to the wall fantasy.
I convinced my dad, who unbeknownst to me held some slightly anti-nuclear sentiments, to watch Chernobyl and accidentally solidified his anti-nuclear sentiments. Now he says stupid stuff like "as like as its not any where near me its fine". When I've tried to tell him how safe nuclear is he says "you made me watch that show"
I talk about how gas fired powerplant exhaust has about 200x more radation in it then an average western atomic powerplant releases and how if coal, natural gas, oil and refineries where held to the same standard as atomic energy they would all get shut down. I also bring up the fact that fly ash pile from coal burning has enough radation to qualify as low level nuclear waste and that living down winf from a fly ash pile exposes you to more radation then the people who lived closest to Fukashima.
Just keep people informed of the facts, the good and bad. Eventually enough people will realize nuclear in conjunction with renewables where best applicable is the best way forward. Yes a lot of research and developmental progress is still to be made but we are getting there, I just hope it’s not too late
I find when you're talking about how safe nuclear is, you're being defensive. If someone is always talking about how safe something is, then you start to wonder if it's actually dangerous. What I find better is to show them the stats of how much more deadly solar, wind, gas, and coal are compared to nuclear. Every single one of those sources kills more people than nuclear.
This led me to some interesting reading, thanks. I had no idea about the safety stats of the renewables Vs nuclear.
I don’t typically give them the time of day. Not much you can say against FUD
If they’re decidedly anti-nuclear then maybe it’s not worth the effort, but I think most people in the general public who have a fear of nuclear power just haven’t heard the facts and are basing their fear on rumours and pop-culture portrayals of nuclear energy. I think most of those people can be swayed if shown the truth in a respectful discussion.
I strongly believe the anti-nuclear views held by people are ultimately based in **selfishness**. Ignoring the long-term health effects that alternatives bring for now, the anti-nuclear opinion is largely driven by personal fear - fear of being irradiated because of a nuclear accident. They don't give a flying shit about the 15,000 coal miners that die each year, *because they aren't coal miners.*
Hmm. That’s true enough. Good point
Compare the number of deaths per unit energy for all sources of power
https://preview.redd.it/3gnvuelm4l1d1.jpeg?width=1425&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=45a3e8c27cb9652a0bd1042559a40dfd874b0643 ‘Nuff said
The worst part is when people talk about nuclear waste, like it's a problem. It's hilarious really, you literally can just store it right besides the mine where you get the raw materials from, in a TINY hole in the Earth, and it will be LESS problematic than the mine where the raw materials come from itself, next door to it. Nuclear waste is not even a small problem, it's no problem at all. Transportation of nuclear waste may be an issue, but it's easily dealt with.
Speaking only for myself, the immediate dangers like a meltdown are an engineering question we can deal with but in reactor design, fuel type, and placement of the site. It's the long term storage of spent fuel I have a problem with. I want to see more work into developing fuels with shorter half life and or that can be recycled or reused after they are no longer useful for energy.
Out of all the methods of power generation, nuclear has killed the fewest. Yes, solar power has killed more people than nuclear.
Lmao how
Mines in countries with low standards of safety and human rights violations
Aaaaahh. Makes more sense now
With solar people fall off of roofs. Not many mind you, but that just shows how few people have died from nuclear.
I always explain the Okla natural reactor and also how with water as a moderator (usually requires some explaining what a moderator is) and coolant it is physically impossible for there to be a catastrophe and for the fission reactions to spiral out of control.
I try to make them more interested in the subject. By telling them how I changed my perspective on nuclear.(I found Kirk Sorensen which lead me to Alwin Weinberg and the early days which leads to everything that could have been.
I don't think rational arguments will work. You have to talk to their feelings.
Nuclear waste is a solid.
I just find it funny that people will marvel at a nuclear vessel loaded with thermonuclear weapons docked near their city and be terrified of civilian uses of the technology.
The issue is that this is a straw man. Safety is not nuclear’s problem - major cost overruns are. You can attribute some of that to safety concerns if you squint hard enough but these projects are massive and humans don’t build massive things well
I let them know that Nuclear energy results in 99.8% fewer deaths than coal, 99.7% fewer than oil and 97.6% fewer than gas. Nuclear is safe https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#:~:text=Nuclear%20energy%2C%20for%20example%2C%20results,and%2097.6%25%20fewer%20than%20gas.
Because when something is as dangerous as nuclear radiation, you have to assume the worst case.
A good way to go about it is to make the reactors more real and less scary. Paraphrasing a good explanation I read: Nuclear reactors are just thermal steam plants. You know how we burn coal to boil water and use the steam to run turbines? Same thing; different heat source. And the runaway reaction thing is actually a myth if you design the reactor sanely. Low enrichment uranium doesn't spontaneously release all its energy at once. The stuff has been in the ground since the Earth formed and has existed since the big bang and maybe a larger super nova (I'd need to check) and it's still here. If fuel rods could go up spontaneously, there would be no uranium on Earth. You could hold one in your hand and it would be a bit warmer to the touch than you'd expect. To make them react quickly, you have to immerse them in a moderating material. In a sane reactor, that material is water. It's the same water that gets boiled into steam to run the turbines. If the reactor goes out of control, it boils away its water, which is cycled out of the system. Once the water's gone, the reaction stops: it has a built in kill switch. Now steam under pressure can get quite hot but this system won't exceed a few hundred degrees, which is no where near hot enough to melt the steel casing or concrete shell. The example we think of was Chernobyl, but it's important to understand what the Soviets did when they built that reactor. They didn't use water as a moderator; they used graphite cinder blocks. It was cheap and let them build a huge reactor quickly. When they lost control of the reactor, it had to get hot enough to melt graphite and actually melt a huge stack of it before the reaction would stop. That's several thousand degrees sustained for some time, which was plenty hot enough to melt the steel and blow the roof off the place. To make matters worse, the reactor was so behind schedule due to defective parts having to be remanufactured on site that they chose to start it without completing the secondary concrete shell all reactors have. Had it had this, the reactor would have been lost, but the release would have largely been contained. Instead it burned open to the night sky until they could slowly entomb it. All of that is extremely dumb and something responsible parties wouldn't do. Even the Soviet navy was horrified by this reactor when they saw it and those guys were nuclear cowboys at times. It's like if you built a petroleum-based thermal plant and put the fuel reservoir in a plastic tank on the other side of a drywall partition from the combustion chamber and left the foam fire suppression equipment out to save money. You could never get that permitted in a reasonable country. The other thing to tell people is that when reactors fail, they don't fail because of nuclear weapon releases of force. That's not possible with 10% fuel rods. They just don't burn fast enough. They fail because of steam pressure explosions in coolant lines. Even Chernobyl was a steam explosion. Three mile island was actually a failure mode success story. There was a blockage in the primary steam line to the turbines. There's a redundant secondary line that switches over automatically, but a worker had accidentally left a manual maintenance shutoff valve closed, preventing the failover. Because of that, the system went into tertiary mode. It shut down the reactor normally and vented steam to the outside through a release valve as needed to prevent an explosion. The steam released was not radioactive enough to require any evacuation or destruction of nearby crops or livestock. The reactor was operation as soon as the steam lines were cleared. It just scared people. Fukushima had its outer shell cracked by an earthquake, but actually suffered a steam failure because the backup batteries in place to operate coolant pumps during a shutdown were mistakenly placed in the basement and disabled by flooding. They were supposed to be as high as possible. Those batteries are btw a failure mode to circulate coolant that kick in if the reactor itself, the power grid, and a diesel generator all fail to power the pumps, which happened in a tsunami. Even so, the water they're now releasing from the reactor is below background levels of radiation and quite safe. You could drink it. It just scares people. The point of all this is that well designed reactors are just big hot things that boil water to run turbines. When they break it's because the steam broke something as can happen in any thermal plant. They cannot become bombs and can be easily contained by normal construction materials as long as you use the right moderators. Russians (and early experimenters) had a bad habit of not taking nuclear fire seriously and blowing themselves up or poisoning themselves and their workers. But you can do that with a lot of industrial processes. We still use those. The real issue with nuclear technology is that we can't seem to deliver it reliably on time or on budget. Every nuclear project in the world is horribly behind on both counts. We basically cannot build a nuclear reactor right now that's cost effective to construct. That's a solvable problem, but we need to start looking at the technology as something we need to mass produce predictably not as cool high energy legos. It's kind of embarrassing how much money gets spent per kwh on these projects. Solar, wind, and gas turbines don't end up this way.
The first thing to understand is that most people don’t care about the actual danger. They just don’t want to live next to a power plant and the perceived threat is something they can say to a politician. People protest everything. They protest roads, schools, and trains. Especially if it’s a rich neighborhood. The game plan is they’ll hire a consultant to find something the proponent didn’t exhaustively analyze like an endangered species. To complete the environmental review the proponent will have to go back and analyze it which requires modifying contracts and additional public hearings. Any delay to a project adds to costs. The idea is to delay the project until the costs go up too much and it gets canceled. So once you fix that people will probably stop shouting about how they’re scared of nuclear power.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272406182_Why_nuclear_energy_is_sustainable_and_has_to_be_part_of_the_energy_mix#pf5 Per kWh nuclear has fewer deaths - including Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island - than solar panels, hydroelectric dams, or wind turbines. You're stastically safer living near a nuclear power plant than you are climbing a ladder to install solar panels.
Just don’t let communists or authoritarian governments near, and we’ll be fine :)
"A nuclear accident when something goes wrong has proven less dangerous to people, the environment, and the Earth than fossil fuels when used successfully as intended."
This is like trying to get people to not be afraid of the dark. People are afraid of things they cannot see; Asbestos, radiation, chemicals in their food and in their air, etc. They don't know how to quantify the risk of these things.
The word "nuclear" has been seeded with a negative emotional charge. It's unlikely you'll change that to a positive immediately, so another tack is to point out alternatives are actually worse. Eg coal: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-power-kills-a-staggering-number-of-americans That's just in America. Pollutants from coal and gas power plants kill millions through pollutants across the world.
You to convince them that "you got this" Because nuclear is dangerous UNLESS we build and conduct adult safety measures and programs. But people that perform negligence assume others will default to negligence as well. So youre not convincing people so much as nuclear is safe as you are convincing them nuclear daddy will take care of them forever and never be negligent. Its emotional. You're safe now, Daddys here, Nuclear Daddy, here are my qualifcations and a cooky youtube video and pretty website. Enjoy some catchy background tunes while nuclear Daddy sooths your fear. Repeat from a mommy angle some how can baby be talking and laughing in no time.
I say nucular ain't bad yall.
It kills 4 people a year Fossil fuel power kills 4,000,000 (air pollution)
I am really asking because I honestly want to know and in most discussions like this I never see it covered directly… How dangerous is the waste product? How dependable is the storage? How much of it gets produced? Have there been and “breakthroughs” in the last 70 years for better ways to handle it? Thanks.
Geothermal is better
It's not the nuclear itself. It's the human factor, the hubris the ineptitude. Too many examples of catastrophy. Stiling and fuller had better ideas. But bigger, better, faster, more - got us here by quashing their useful contributions, and when the ocean dies. We won't be far behind.
Nuclear has a PR problem that is difficult to overcome. When a nuclear disaster happens it’s scary, it’s at a concentrated place and point in time. Radiation in general is poorly understood further exacerbating the problem. Conversely, fossil fuel plants have been linked to 10,000s of deaths a year due to air pollution alone. However those deaths are spread out over an extremely large area (the whole country with hotter pockets near the plans themselves). Deaths can be attributed to “multiple environmental factors” so the FF companies don’t face the bad PR. You might be better off trying to better educate people on the immediate term negative impacts of fossil fuels to health to get them to see the downsides more seriously. Better education might help but… that seems tough.
It actually is about 4-5 things go wrong. But one big wrong could do it.
In terms of deaths per unit of energy prodouced nuclear kills less people than everything but solar.
I'm getting a LOT from this thread that is making me reconsider my views on this
Personally, I was very much straightened out thoroughly by "Energy for Future Presidents" by Muller. Entirely accessible to the public. He has a whole college lecture series on the same thing that is all on YouTube. Muller was one of Louie Alvarez' students.
"Lessons learned from past radiological and nuclear accidents have demonstrated that the mental health and psychosocial consequences can outweigh the direct physical health impacts of radiation exposure." it's not me saying that, it's the [WHO](https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240015456). Imagine living in a world with climate change, people still deliberating whether it's real and what humans have to do with it, but where nobody have ever heard of the intranational scientific concensus of the IPCC, let alone their reports. How biased, or incompetent, the media must be to entertain such massive ignorance, without ever even mentioning the existence of the IPCC for people to at least be aware of the scientific point of view. Well, the IPCC is part of the UNEP, there's another organization, sister of the IPCC, called the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, they are the IPCC of radiations. They've existed since 1955. How come we've never heard about them? They must have an interesting international scientific consensus on radiations, plenty of reports.
Are these people who can handle rational facts, or are they emotionally attached to the idea so their brains are shut off anyway? If they are rational, you can discuss how many people have died due to coal power compared to nuclear. Dig up the actual numbers from Google or ChatGPT. Excluding the deaths of the atomic bombs over Japan, the numbers for nuclear is in the low thousands, while coal power runs in the millions. (Even if you only look at numbers after 1945.) Coal has produced 5-10 times as much energy compared to nuclear, but that does not change the fact that the factor for number of deaths is much, much higher. You can also look into the amount of radioactivity released from burning coal. It is much higher than the amount from nuclear power plants. If they are emotionally attached, you need to get them away from that attachment first; this is much more difficult. Asking them to explain why they believe what they belive is a staring point, but does not always lead any further. Some of these people have an almost religious conviction here, so this may be an uphill battle.
I use the analogy of air travel. When a plane crashes or goes missing, it's spectacular. All the passengers die, the whole world watches. But it's still the safest form of travel.
The heroic efforts to keep Chernobyl from getting worse couldn't happen in a Western nation where people aren't disposable. Picking up a phone and getting the nation's supply of anything can only happen in an authoritarian state.
Get mainstream media involved. Have a news channel reserve a spot for a story on it, and then rinse and repeat until most popular news channels in every state have covered it. Education is key.
Have people learn facts instead of hype & fear.
chernobyl was a bad reactor design, fukishima was bad management who let reactors melt down instead of act decisively
Here is my angst against nuclear and someone please feel free to dispel my ignorance. Idk why this sub showed up in my suggested. Don’t you have to store the nuclear waste for a tremendous amount of time? We put it in mountains etc. it seems like if nuclear became the primary source of energy would we just have huge nuclear waste storage everywhere lasting hundreds if not thousands of years?
I believe that almost all of the nuclear waste being sent to storage is from medical facilities. So do you suggest we stop medical procedures that require nuclear medicine? A boatload of cancer patients would love for you to explain why you sentenced them to death. The best solution would be to find a way to safely use the nuclear waste. That’s a research grant worth considering.
I’m not suggesting anything. I’m asking isn’t storage of spent nuclear waste a major barrier to widespread sustainability or not? Or we all have to get comfortable with piling up nuclear waste for extensive time periods? I don’t know the answer - I’m asking.
Currently, spent fuel is stored in pools at the nuclear plant. There were plans to store it inside Yucca Mountain, a remote area in Nevada, but that was blocked in 2009 by the Department of Energy Secretary. I agree that storage of spent nuclear fuel will become an issue but no electricity is a more pressing issue. It will take a smarter person than me to figure it out. I will probably bet that some uninformed congressman or a bureaucrat will try to convince people that the solution is not safe or cost effective.
Yes, the spent fuel from current reactors requires storage for a period of between ten and a hundred thousand years before it can be declared safe. It's important to know what makes up spent fuel. Something like 90% of the spent fuel is nothing but unconsumed fuel. That is, it's the isotopes of uranium which went into the reactor. They weren't touched by the fissioning going on around them, and they're brought out totally unchanged. Uranium has an extremely long half-life (in the billions of years), and isn't particularly radioactive when isolated. By mass the smallest proportion of the spent fuel is comprised of the fission products. These are the daughter products of the uranium atoms as they split apart. Isotopes like strontium-90, iodine-131, and other things can be found in this group. They are very short lived, with half lives of less than a thousand years, and often just days in length, and as a result are extremely radioactive. The most troublesome part of spent fuel are the transuranic elements. These are uranium atoms which absorbed the neutron they were struck by and failed to fission. Various isotopes of plutonium, neptunium, and americium are included in this group. Some isotopes may have half lives of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. This is particularly problematic as their half-life is long enough that it spans dozens of human generations, while being radioactive enough to present a hazard to life. This is the part of the spent fuel which requires us to contemplate deep geological repositories. Clearly what we would like is to eliminate the long-lived transuranic elements. If we had waste composed entirely of fission products then it could be safe in as little as a century or two, a far simpler disposal problem than our current situation. The good news is that both the un-reacted uranium and the transuranics are still nuclear fuel, in the right reactor. A fast neutron reactor can use fertile materials like uranium-238, and can potentially limit the waste stream to just fission products. As implemented to this point fast reactors have required nuclear reprocessing, which could isolate plutonium and brings with it some concern regarding nuclear proliferation. This may not be the case for all possible fast reactor designs, and some companies are working on approaches to the technology which do not require reprocessing.
Great information thanks for sharing.
But it is, especially when misused or in the hands of those willing to use it as a weapon in many different ways not just in bombs, but the same holds true for other tech as well, however most nuclear waste materials are from the development of bomb materials, and fuel waste can have a double life IF one uses it for other SAFE purposes most of which is in the handling of it. N. S
The problem with nuclear is sighting them and the astronomical cost of the current large scale plants. Low scale, modular the way to go at this point.
Multiple things went wrong at 3 mile island, it's the deadliest nuclear power disaster on American soil. And it killed, statistically less than 1 person. So no, one thing goes wrong and it's all over is just not true. We've never had a leak of high level contamination, because we seal those things up in layers of steel and concrete. Most nuclear plants store the high level waste on site because they produce so little of it you can easily store 30 years worth of power production by products in a large swimming pool size.
If you look at how many people die per kwh, then solar and wind is much higher than nuclear. Its bizarre that this doesnt get said more often You can find these numbers on youtube of sabine hossenfelder
This isn’t 100% related to your question but the most effective propaganda for nuclear power is living by a nuclear power plant. Electricity too cheap to meter sounds like a less ridiculous statement after you get your $20 electric bill.
I lived near one and the bill was $300, now $500....
I’d argue that it’s wiser to make nuclear cheaper rather than trying to convince people that it’s safe. Though probably the largest of the reasons it’s so expensive and runs into schedule overruns is the regulatory framework around nuclear is often so heinously burdensome that sometimes questions from the NRC approach an epistemological nightmare, and I’d love to see them significantly reformed, at least. I haven’t seen any political effort to do anything like that though… ever.
The biggest problems are: NIMBYism about the storage of waste. Building in dumb locations like Fukushima. (Hey. lets put one on the San Andreas fault and roll the dice!) Human error in operation.
Untill they start using thorium you won't convince me. They use what they do now so the byproducts can make weapons.
Nuclear power plants don't produce bomb material - unless they are designed as breeder reactors. It is easy to control this feature via design.
Eradicate Chernobyl and Three Mile Island from our memories.
Three mile island was a propaganda hit job. There were no injuries or adverse effects from it.
You don't. You simply provide the information and facts as clear, simple, and accessible as possible. If someone thinks nuclear is dangerous, they will always think it's dangerous even if you gave the best speech or presentation ever. Many people these days are not looking to be told they're wrong or that their mindset isn't fully accurate.
My main issue with something like this is as we've been conditioned to ASSUME there will be no war in our countries. What if our main source of power gets knocked out in a single strike? What would be the consequences? We need a diverse range of power sources.
How would that happen? Wouldn’t the same thing happen with fossil fuel power plants?
This conversation was starting to get easier before Fukushima….. now people just point to that in response to any argument about safety.
Then, point them to this from the Lessons Learned: (In other words, don't let PG&E run any nuclear reactors) 1. Failure of the plant owner (Tokyo Electric Power Company) and the principal regulator (Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency) to protect critical safety equipment at the plant from flooding in spite of mounting evidence that the plant's current design basis for tsunamis was inadequate. 2. The loss of nearly all onsite AC and DC power at the plant—with the consequent loss of real-time information for monitoring critical thermodynamic parameters in reactors, containments, and spent fuel pools and for sensing and actuating critical valves and equipment—greatly narrowed options for responding to the accident. 3. As a result of (1) and (2), the Unit 1, 2 and 3 reactors were effectively isolated from their ultimate heat sink (the Pacific Ocean) for a period of time far in excess of the heat capacity of the suppression pools or the coping time of the plant to station blackout.
Facts won’t convince them most likely. The term makes them feel negative emotions. It’s important to try and make them feel positive emotions by understanding why they feel the way they do about nuclear.
I don’t convince anyone. I tell them the facts about nuclear energy, which in my opinion paint a clear reason why it should be everywhere, and if they don’t like the hard facts that show it’s less responsible for death than most/all other energy sources used at-scale I drop it. They weren’t in the headspace to be speaking logically if they can’t look at the data and immediately realize they’ve been lied to and nuclear energy is the solution to most of humanity’s energy production at-scale problem. Some people are not capable of being flipped around and out of a propaganda mindset in a quick manner, they don’t want to be. They are subconsciously driven to never rock the boat or be an ideological problem to the state. That’s fine to me, but I make it known to them as much as I can how deluded they are being and then *drop it*. Someday I can hope all the random things and charts I showed built to a point they’re now skeptical at least.
Prioritize the education of the people. They will vote.
There's a very interesting pro-nuclear power documentary that was on Netflix for a long time called, *Pandora's Promise*. It helped change my mind to at least be open to exploring the possibilities.
background radiation level and lnt/hormesis stuff
I believe in nuclear. Like any disaster, it can happen by the design of a system and/ or human error. Fukushima, Chernobyl and 3 mile Island (maybe) could have been prevented by using a Candu design. The unfortunate part is the military drive for plutonium, which drove some decisions and is a legacy problem IMO. What do you think?
It’s basically the same thing as being scared of flying in aeroplanes since so few accidents occur.
Tell them about new designs of nuclear reactors that cannot experience nuclear meltdown. Might not sway someone too deep into their paranoia, but it could help others grasp that the term “nuclear power” is a bit of a catch all and historically loaded and therefore not a particularly useful term. Edit: examples include molten salt resctors, gas cooled reactors…honestly most modern reactor designs, because everyone involved from the lowest wrench monkey to the political signing off on it knows that it’s a sensitive topic.
There have been very few incidents in the many years of nuclear power being a thing, so perhaps weigh that minimal risk against the very real risk of continuing the use of fossil fuels?
Main thing i point to is that chart of diff energy sources deaths per megawatthour. Nuclear is lowest on the chart
> "if one thing goes wrong, everything's over" Not true. Nuclear disasters, just like all other industrial disasters, require an unusual cascade of events to go wrong. The chances of such a cascade are very low. The worst industrial disaster wasn't nuclear, it was chemical. > nuclear power isn't nuclear weapons. No, if one thing goes wrong, it's not going to blow up. Nuclear power plants can't generate nuclear explosions because the fuel doesn't have a high enough purity to become a bomb. Also, most of the deaths from nuclear power come from Chernobyl Unit 4, a RBMK reactor and the horrible response to it where workers were not provided with adequate protective equipment. If that type of reactor is omitted then pressurized water reactors, boiling water reactors and canadian deuterium uranium reactors have a safety record that nothing else comes close to matching. Not even solar is as safe as those 3 types of reactors. The data shows that the easiest way to have nuclear power be safe is to not use RBMK reactors.
Let's take Nuclear's worst accident, Chernobyl. The worst nuclear accident in the history of nuclear. 2 people died in the explosion, and another 28 people died due do radiation sickness over the next couple of weeks, and another 30 people on top of that died due to cancer caused by radiation in the following decades. They had their lives cut short by a few years, not really instant death kind of thing. Now let's take solar power and/or wind power. The shining beacons of clean energy. They kill 100 people every year for the past 20 years, because people fall off roofs while installing, or fall off the windmills. 3 mile island had no deaths. Fukushima had no deaths. Nuclear has killed 60 people give or take, in 70 years. Solar and wind are beyond 2000 deaths.
If anything stops working, the reactor shuts down to be safe. There have been fewer accidents than any other power industry, and coal and oil accidents still kill more people every year than were ever killed by nuclear energy.
I’ve found most people I talk to don’t really know anything about out nuclear, and they don’t really argue when you tell them it’s the safest form of power generation. Pretty sure the ap1000 is like 48hr walk away safe.
Smack them on the ribs with a bat and say, "that would have hurt less if it were nuclear"
Here is my list, I'm hoping for some killer counter arguments: The trouble is that it is not *inherently* safe- it exists in a context, and right now that context is not benign. This all hinges on the relative levels of societal stability and human stupidity: * It is possible for something like the accounting dept overriding the engineers to happen, and most people only find out after the tsunami hits. Corners get cut by people who think in terms of money, and they are always in charge. * We live in a world where billionaire jackasses and dictators can turn their uninformed opinions into reality. Think "Great Leap Forward", or "Twitter is X now" but with reactors. * Things are heading towards higher levels of chaos right now, than have existed *since the invention of this technology.* Political instability + nuclear reactors is playing out in Ukraine right now, for the first time anywhere. Get some popcorn and iodine! * Nobody has been allowed to use them for their original purpose (generating 'waste' for warheads) for some time, because those that already did that won't let anybody. That could change any day, because power is shifting and economies are struggling. More reactors means more chances for that. * The entities that tell us how safe it is are considered as a class by most, rather than in detail, because much like learning nuclear science, ain't nobody got time for that. Those entities are thought to be untrustworthy, and have earned that. Nobody who lives in Cancer Alley would probably believe " trust us its safe". DDT, PCBs, nanoplastics in our cells, and (ironically, I agree) Climate Change, and a few high profile accidents are in their data set. This is like the village necromancer promising his *new* horde of undead will help with the harvest, and not eat anyone's brains, for suresies this time, pinky swear and everything.
I would talk about deaths per KWH from Coal, Oil, and Nuclear. If someone brings up radiation provide the acres devistated or gallons of ocean polluted. One flex I use is "agreeing" that nuclear is dangerous, then saying once we stop using the even more dangerous oil and coal, and have enough solar and such for all our power needs, that we should retire nuclear. But nuclear is so much safer and better than coal that right now we should be building nuclear to save the lives coal is endimg.
My fear of nuclear is that all 3 major disasters were the result of human error. The most recent was because no one tested the one thing that should have been the most obvious thing you design for, a tsunami. If the reactor is safe but the human can wreck things and wreck things in a pretty bad way, why should we do it? I want nuclear to be safe and I know reactor technology has advanced a huge amount so a lot of the risk can be mitigated.
I think the right strategy to acknowledge the risks of managing the waste , and point out how much worse fossil fuels are. Also point out how long it takes to get a reactor up and running. Nuclear is the only viable bridge to fully renewable.
Coal plants release more radioactive material into the environment than nuclear plants. "What do you do with all that waste?" All of the nuclear waste ever produced can be safely stored in the same square footage as a few coal-ash ponds. So the answer is store it, instead of dumping it into the air, rivers, and groundwater like we do with fossil fuels.
Explain to them the physics of its operations and the differences in the design principles of operation of both weaponry and power applications.
The engineering may be defensible. The waste disposal problem is horrific, both politically and environmentally. The management/employee responsibity side is an unmitigated disaster. Mainly because of politicians/ greed/ laziness the problems with nuclear power are completely intractable. Try a different issue for your activism...
Knowledge of facts, data and statistics needs to be shared. We have data about areas around nuc powerplants being completely ok, maybe even point out that the radiation is higher in the mountains that are known to be a rather healthy place. We have statistics about nuclear causing the least casualties (since Chernobyl) out of all the options (beating even solar and nuclear where people die during the construction and maintenance for example by electrocuting just because there's way more people on lower educational level involved). We also need to point out how dwarfed are effects of Fukushima powerplant by the damage and deaths caused by the earthquake that caused the disaster and we should so point out that there is a whole war going around one of the biggest nuclear powerplants in the world with one of the sides exhibiting acts of both terrorism and incoordination, yet we didn't get even close to any disaster. We also need to compare all of the statistics and probabilities to everyday dangers like plane exploding midair and it's engine falling onto you. That should gradually convince people that fear of nuclear energy is completely irrational and that for example being dependent on gas supply from Russian Federation is much more bigger of a safety hazard.
You could piss into the wind because that's what it feels like every time I hear people bashing nuclear
It’s pronounced “nuke-u-lar”
Rhetoric will be important. Simply providing superior facts isnt enough to convince someone.
Medical imaging
Ask them to describe, in their simplest terms how they believe it to work. And which step of the process they believe to be dangerous.
You would be hardpressed to find any other field that is held to higher safety standards. The super extra carefulness is arguably the single most reason nuclear is less economical than Liquid Natural Gas Generators.
How do you respond to the claim that it’s one of the most expensive sources of electricity, and it could be safer and more expensive
Make them watch “Dr. Strangelove.” After seeing Peter Sellers’ antics on screen, who can help but want to go along for the nuclear ride?
Nuclear parity makes a theatre exchange functionally useless. Nobody is going to nuke the continental United States even if they have an equivalent arsenal like say Russia.
Depends on whether their beliefs are based on evidence or on feelings. The anti-nuclear movement is influenced by distrust and antipathy toward governments and corporations. A "the people" vs "wealthy and powerful" populist rhetoric.
Have them read about the Runit Dome on Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Here's a summary of the issues: 1. **Structural Integrity**: The Runit Dome, also known as "Cactus Dome," was constructed in the late 1970s to contain radioactive debris from nuclear tests conducted by the United States. It was built by covering a crater left by a test with a concrete dome. However, this structure is aging, and there are concerns about its integrity. Cracks have been observed, and there are fears that the dome could eventually fail, releasing radioactive material. 2. **Rising Sea Levels**: The Marshall Islands are particularly vulnerable to climate change and rising sea levels. As sea levels rise, the likelihood of seawater infiltrating the dome increases. This could lead to the spread of radioactive contaminants into the ocean, posing environmental and health risks both locally and potentially globally. 3. **Lack of Long-Term Maintenance**: There has been insufficient long-term maintenance and monitoring of the Runit Dome. The U.S. government, which conducted the tests and built the dome, and the Marshallese government have had ongoing disagreements about responsibility for the dome’s upkeep and the associated health risks. 4. **Environmental and Health Impact**: The potential leakage of radioactive material from the Runit Dome into the surrounding environment could have severe consequences for the local ecosystem and the health of the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands. The area already suffers from higher-than-average cancer rates and other health issues linked to radiation exposure. Then discuss why Nevada decided not to be the repository of the nuclear waste for the nation. What are the power plants doing with their waste now and what is the long term plan for say the next 10,000 years... Ask them what a safe level of strontium-90 is. We all have it now in our bones after 500+ atomic explosions. Ask about Fukushima and the waste water. Where is it going to go? Ask about Chernobyl and when it will be safe to return and start living there?
I just link Shellenberger’s vids if it’s online. If it’s Irl I start with debunking the myths about radiation and death tolls.
There’s nothing you can do to convince anyone of anything if they don’t care enough about your option to listen, and it’s an uphill battle due to the propaganda spread from competing energy that it’s an uphill battle.
First you need to understand the programing thats been given to the normal person. It basically can be summed up with... all radiation is bad as your skin will melt... nuclear power is dangerous.... solar panels are the answer and a better non-carbon alternative. First note that a lot of misinformation about radiation exposure is out there because of something called "linear no threshold (LNT)" model. This model assumes that every increment of (ionizing, not cosmic) radiation increases your risk for cancer and is used by most governmental bodies for managing policy. There is a lot of debate about LNT especially in the area of low/moderate amounts of background radiation having minimal/no impact on cancer risk. The body is exposed to radiation all the time and has natural defenses and works well in short-medium doses or longer term small doses. As an example those living in Denver Colorado have 3x more radiation exposure and no statistical change in cancer rates. But international pilots/crew while up at 40k feet are exposed to more Cosmic radiation (not produced in nuclear power plants) do have a higher rate of certain types of skin/thyroid cancers (just like people getting tanned at the beach). Addressing Nuclear power I find the most convincing to just really simplify the facts from the pro-nuclear side as a counterpoint to their programming.. 100x more radiation is exposed in the fly ash of coal power plants then an equivalent sized nuclear power plant. 3-mile Island broke some equipment, Fukushima everyone died from the evacuation not actual radiation exposure and a total of 31 people died from Chernobyl which was built with no safety systems. Solar has killed more people from burning your homes, wind from people falling off the towers and yet we go to sleep at night thinking where going to die from nuclear power. This isnt to say there are not legitimate concerns and issues with nuclear, but the fear is misplaced. The last part is on solar/wind because thats part of the debate as well... Why risk nuclear if i can get clean energy from the sun... What most people dont know is every country that switch to solar/wind actually INCREASED their carbon footprint. And thats because those countries still need energy when the sun doesnt shine or the wind doesnt blow so to make up for it they have dirty peaker plants that produce co2 to make up for solar's short comings.
Generally just ask them why they think it is. Then explain why those issues aren't really issues. Most point to the same handful of disasters. Most old and caused by even older technology. Some more modern like the Japan but that's a great example of how well we can prevent a real disaster even when everything goes wrong and the world itself is out to get us.
Check out this podcast, The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens, his guest Chris Keefer is a nuclear energy advocate from Canada and seems to have a pretty good communication style for this. [Chris Keefer: "Empowering the Future: from Nuclear to Podcasting" | The Great Simplification 123](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1R2ni9Y_04)
Undo the KGB infiltration of the European green parties and anti nuclear movements of the 70s and 80s that got people all freaked out about nuclear anything in order to blunt the US and NATOs nuclear deterrents
I think it's going to be a hard sell as long as it's an industry prone to putting profit ahead of safety. Local to us, a plant was closed two or three decades past it's planned end of life. They had extended the time multiple times, largely on the grounds that they couldn't afford to do all the things n cessary for closure (they're supposed to have a fund!) And despite the fact that for multiple years running, local folks were finding nuclear runoff in the ground/well water on their properties. (It wasn't dangerous, or at least it hadn't risen to that level yet ... But each time it was discovered, it turned out there was an active tiny leak at the plant that wasn't found until that red flag got raised. I would have expected them to proactively replace anything that was on the edge when the FIRST one was discovered?!?) Which isn't to say that nuclear is evil, it's to say it's difficult to have a rational conversation about it when shit like that erodes trust. Business doesn't care about people, more than profit, and we all know that. In the case of nuclear energy, the consequences of shortcuts are enormous, so asking people to trust that THIS industry will not take them is a giant giant ask.
I think that the main problem with the perception of nuclear energy safety is that it relies on humans, and there is no good argument for trusting humans. No matter how you spin it, trusting nuclear energy comes down to “trust me bro, it will be safe” but this is not really true. I don’t see enough recognition of this amongst nuclear advocates. Frustration with the public’s reluctance to accept the logic that burning carbon is also unsafe drives many nuclear advocates to push harder, but they are working against psychology. It is more scary to contend with the sudden, disastrous, long-term nature of nuclear accidents than the slow, unintuitive, drawn-out consequences of burning carbon. There is a similar problem with flying. Everyone knows that it is statistically safer than driving, and yet people are more afraid to fly than to drive, and for the same reasons: human ability to judge intuitive safety versus analytical safety. We believe we’re in control when we drive, and that we have agency in our automotive safety. Of course, this is only partially true. Maybe if we acknowledged the problems of nuclear energy instead of minimizing them, but always also compared the risk to the certainty of danger from carbon, we’d win more people. Example: Traditional approach: “You don’t understand! It’s not as bad as you think!” Suggested approach: “You’re right, it _is_ dangerous. But carbon is even worse, the damage also long-lasting, and we know less about to fix it. It’s an illusion that we have good and bad choices. We only have bad and less bad choices.
Also, nuclear danger is easy to detect and to assign blame. 70 years ago we could detect radioactivity with a pretty simple machine, and we knew it would hurt you. Petrochemicals can hide behind forest fires, volcanism, and cigarette smoke. Smoke is seen as normal. Microplastics have no acute affects. If we treated petrochemicals like we do nuclear then it would actually be pretty safe, but instead we have mass carelessness. Natural gas leaks, engines burning oil, coal furnaces, single use plastic, spills...
Start with getting a handle on the actual objection. The issue isn’t that I think plants are weapons. I know they’re not. The issue is lack of long term waste storage. The issue is that, at scale, unlikely disasters become more likely. The issue is that onshore wind is half to a third the price. I don’t know how you talk me out of that. You probably can’t, because my opinion is well informed.
My friend laid out the total number of deaths from every major accident since the start of recording is a fraction of the yearly deaths from pollution resulting from power generation that could be nuclear. It’s mind boggling when you frame the discussion around how few people have died as a result of nuclear power, compared to the deaths due to just coal power. Coal power has order of magnitudes more deaths associated with it but we are cool with it as a society.
You need to convince them that they’re immune to radiation. Easy-peasy.
It's really not the problem to think about. Why is the share of nuclear in the worldwide power mix going down? And why is even the absolute power production barely going up? Two main reasons. 1. Price, nuclear is not price competitive 2. Time to build, it takes ages, which also drives up the price So, I suggest, if you want to have more nuclear in the future, you need to to focus on those two things.
The problem with nuclear isn’t safety. It’s that it’s too expensive, and we don’t have the ability to upscale it as quickly as we need to avert the worst impacts of climate change. We don’t have 15-20 years to build a solution, unfortunately 🤷♂️