NathanTPS t1_is8n1jg wrote
Reply to comment by Sketti_n_butter in Ethics of Nuclear Energy in Times of Climate Change: Escaping the Collective Action Problem by CartesianClosedCat
Look into three mile island.
Also saying we haven't had any accidents isn't really a great reason. We also hardly have any nuclear power plants left. The US hasn't built a new power plant in like 40+ years. There are plenty of conventional power plants that cause work place injuries every year, of we had the same number of nuclear power plants as those, thered be no doubt that we'd have issues. And all it takes is one 3 mile island, one chyrnople, one Fukushima, and the public will be against fission again.
Fusion is the holy grail of nuclear energy. It uses light elements to create power so there aren't heavy radioactive isotope byproducts. Plus fusion is considerably more powerful, aka energy efficient compared to fission.
Fusion is clean nuclear energy while Fission is dirty nuclear energy.
We can create Fusion bombs, but that's hot Fusion, meaning we have to use a fission bomb to jump start the process, making the detonation dirty.
Nuclear reactors don't work like bombs, so we can't just nuke a Fusion reactor into existence.
Jumpstarting a Fusion reactor without a hot detonation is the holy grail of limitless clean energy-cold Fusion. And is why everyone is so "obsessed" over it.
Sketti_n_butter t1_is8ppde wrote
>Look into three mile island.
Three mile island did not cause a single injury to the public. The reactor broke. Yes. But it was contained. Everyone in the community was safe.
NathanTPS t1_is8ur2d wrote
Just think about that for a second. The reactor didn't merely "break" that makes it sound like a simple mechanical failure in your car. When a reactor fails you have as good a likelihood of severe disaster as you do containment. And the containment of three mile island wasn't really containment, they just managed to stop the meltdown from going critical. Radioactive smoke still spewed into the air, even if there wasn't a chrynople style explosion with the meltdown or a Fukushima melt through the floor and into the ocean. Either was entirely possible, and it's less that the incident happened in the "good ol' US of A" than it was fortunate luck.
My main point was that if we ended up opening enough ractors to meet our current and future energy needs, eventually, sooner than later, we would have reactor meltdowns, and some would be like Fukushima and some would be like chrynople, and yes, some would be like three mile island.
Point is, we don't want that old 40 year technology running our reactors. As has been mentioned, there are way safer reactor designs now than what we are using ones that contribute far less waste. There is still was, but it is fractions upon fractions of what the current in use reactors produce.
zowie54 t1_is9czpd wrote
Sorry, but treating either of those situations like inevitable problems is not accurate or useful. Look at the US Navy's track record. There are 15 reactors in Pearl Harbor that no one bats an eye about, but if you suggest swapping nuclear for Oahu's fossil fuel based power generation, the public would lose their minds. People need to remember that nuclear isn't the villain
Sketti_n_butter t1_is9juhc wrote
The technology is mature. That means the bugs have been worked out. Nuclear is the the safest technology on earth when you look at deaths per megawatt hour either in the industry or from the public. Hell, coal plant put out more radiation that nuclear plants. Literally the safest technology on earth and anyone who says otherwise hasn't read the data.
ExileFrontier t1_is9mlyv wrote
The navy has 160 nuclear reactors and a lot of them run off that 40 year old technology. Yet the navy has not had a nuclear accident in the roughly 70 years it's nuclear program has been alive.
jbr945 t1_is8s6q0 wrote
There's a lot of myths to unpack there. First, the USA is completing 2 new reactors in Georgia. As for accidents, the current fleet is run very well, and newer designs like the AP1000 design in Georgia are dramatically safer.
As for fusion being "the holy grail" not so much really for a few reasons: 1. Fission is so much easier to accomplish with the benefits of a clean waste stream, 2. As for efficiency, it depends on what aspect. For net energy return on energy investment, we shall see when the ITER project is completed in France, and conversion that depends on how much of that heat can be converted to electric energy. 3. The waste stream of fission is an easy to manage problem, especially relative to fossil fuels (zero management). 4. Gen 3 and 4 reactors take on the emergency cooling issues very well, and especially the scaling factor of the new reactors from Nuscale offer a repeatability to make a faster mass scale deployment.
So fission may not be perfect but fuels with far less energy density have made energy revolutions before (coal). Fusion just may end up needing a support network of fission reactors in order to make it cleaner from end to end, and if you're at that point then why add the extra layer of complexity with fusion? To me, fusion is a distraction from an already vastly superior fission reactors we can build now.
[deleted] t1_is8u69t wrote
[deleted]
NathanTPS t1_is8v3dw wrote
Um, I was directly answering the question asked "why is everyone so hung up over fusion anyway? What's so great about fusion?" I understand that most know why fusion is so great, I wasn't spouting the obvious just for my chuckles, a question was asked, I gave a reply
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