Atomic Prejudice
Not about social justice! This post is about nuclear power, safety, and risk analysis.
Coal is estimated to kill 161 people per TWh (Terawatt hour). Electricity costs about 12 cents per KWh (Kilowatt hour). That means approximately every $750,000 spent on electricity through coal also costs a human life. Given that the FDA puts the value of a human life at about 8 million, that is somewhat problematic-even very generously assuming that all of that $750,000 goes to compensating for the death toll (and none to, for example, digging up coal or developing the power plants), that is $750,000 out of $8,000,000-leaving about 90% unpaid. That means more than 90% of coal power’s costs is being stolen in the form of people’s deaths to a first approximation. Details of those who are vulnerable probably decrease it some, but it is unlikely to go below 50%.
Stop and think about that for a moment. I’m pretty sure that goes well past what massive violent crime syndicates do.
What is their secret? Well, it is hard to impossible to point to any specific death and say ‘this death was caused by coal’ outside of things like mining accidents, and mining accidents are hard to distinguish from each other-‘mining accident mining coal’ and ‘mining accident mining copper’-do you know of a difference?
Nuclear power is estimated to kill 0.04 people per TWh-less than rooftop solar (0.44), European hydro (0.10, which is lower than world hydro at 1.4), or wind (0.10). Nuclear power is also more portable-while the middle of the desert is great for solar power, storing and transporting the power from one location to another is extremely difficult. Transporting nuclear fuel, while still somewhat difficult and has its risks, is of negligible difficulty in comparison.
One might wonder how it is that nuclear power can achieve such a low death toll, being approximately a tenth of even rooftop solar. It probably has something to do with this:
People do occasionally fall off roofs, and you have to setup quite a lot of solar panels before you get close to the power of uranium.
So why is nuclear viewed with such suspicion? Well, for one thing it got off to a rough start-‘Atomic bomb’ and ‘Nuclear War’ are phrases that easily come to mind, while no similar phrases come to mind for ‘coal’. Nuclear power accidents are local (in both time and space)-they happen in very specific locations and times, which makes it far easier to associate damages with the reactor itself, where as coal power plants disperse their harm over time and space. While evacuation has proven effective for keeping the cancer rate increases even in the case of disasters at less than 1%, 12% of people generally die of cancer regardless, and associations are likely to spring to mind whenever someone in that 12% dies after being near a nuclear accident.
Early mysteriousness (green glow!) of radiation means that a lot of people are at least somewhat uncertain of what precisely radiation does-while people are often ignorant of the exact effects of pollution from coal-for example the fact that you actually get MORE radiation exposure from living near a coal power plant than a nuclear power plant, they are far less likely to experience uncertainty unless directly asked. Uncertainty breeds fear as well.
None of these however form an actual argument against nuclear power-an easier time identifying deaths? Why should we care about that, even moreso as a downside. Showing up as a green glow in cartoons? Why would that make nuclear power unwise?
There are some risks associated with malfunctions and transport of nuclear material, but the numbers simply do no bare out-the strongest objection to nuclear power is as far as I can tell simple prejudice.
The problem is that normal people are sick of beep-boop bullshitters damaging their kids by ignoring continuum dynamics (e.g. the “carcinogenic threshold”):
https://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/20850102
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.4161/cc.7.9.5806
It is my understanding that in normal operation Coal power plants release much more radiation into the environment than Nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power plants face some bad economics. They cost a lot to run, even after built. Many nuclear plants in the US that are shutting down in the next 5-10 years are because the economics of continuing to have a permit to run then doesn’t work. Nuclear power plants are also very costly from a regulatory perspective to build.
Natural gas has provided about half of the progress in carbon reduction for power production in the US. Solar and Wind continue to get cheaper and have popular political support with both conservative and liberal politics.
The doses from nuclear plants are mostly sporadic. It’s not a fallacy to argue that fossil fuels are less removed from the states of matter that we’re already adapted to.
People’s suspicions also factor into the economics of running a plant. We don’t know if the tech to get rid of all that fuel is gonna be available soon. At the moment, most plants wouldn’t fail safely if society collapsed (even just for a few years). So they’re a gun to the temple of every prepper-personality.
The tech to reduce the problem from thousands of years of storage to a few centuries of storage sort-of exists already in the form of breeder reactors.
But since we aren’t accounting for carbon costs, or that fossil fuels will run out, or that renewables don’t actually provide power at the times of market demand and thus LCOE is inaccurate, good luck getting past the coordination issues short of another oil crisis.
At least the good news is that there’s enough uranium in seawater to run industrial civilization for thousands of years if it comes to that.
