Why not nuclear power? C'mon, let's follow what the

>>1806066
People are scared of radiation because they don't understand it.

Because Chernobyl and Three Mile Island soured people on nuclear. It's actually quite safe, but the problem is in the rare event that something does go wrong, it can be catastrophic.

Public perception was forever influenced by those incidents.

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>>1806083
>The problem is in the rare event that something does go wrong, it can be catastrophic
Not really, the only reason Chernobyl was anything to even talk about was because it was made defective.

Modern shit is super fucking safe and virtually failure proof. Even when they fail, which is increasingly unlikely, they are designed to fail safely

inb4
>what about fukush--
Fukushima was a very old reactor and they had a magnitude nine something (not gonna look it up because I can't be asked) earthquake that can pretty much only ever happen in the rim of fire. Even then a modern reactor wouldn't fail like that and EVEN then there was no loss of human life nor will there be in the future because of the incident.

Fucking wind turbines kill more people every year than nuclear power has killed in history. I don't see people shying away from those despite how fucking stupid they are.

>>1806101
>wind turbines kill more people

Wind turbine explosions don't make headlines or leave behind radioactive particles. Therefore , people don't give two fucks of some guy died working on one. I agree with what you're saying, but that's just how it is.

Fission is dangerous as hell, there are a ton of small incidents that aren't reported. In Eastern Massachusetts, our Pilgrim Plant was nearly critical under Governor Jane Swift (inherited the position from Weld), and nuclear engineers were being offered bank for 2 hour shifts that would've given them a lifetime full of exposure, just to recover the reactor.

Wasn't even in the news back then, had to hear about it from a nuclear engineer that was a local. His wife wouldn't let him do it, he would've made 200-300K, but he would've been permanently irradiated.

>>1806066
>make everything nuclear-powered.

The amount of radioactive waste would be absolutely insane. Realize this: In 2017 we have exactly zero final storage facilities for highly radioactive waste (ie the actual fissile material from power generation). In the whole world that is. We have a few facilities for low- and mid-level radioactive waste, but none for high-level waste.

We're a meager 60 years into the nuclear age and we still have basically no fucking clue what we're doing long-term. Most reactors online are Generation II and decades old. Only very very few reactors ever built have even started decommissioning and they have consistently over-shot fiancial targets for decommissioning costs, often tenfold.

The US is pouring dozens of billions into cleaning up Hanford Site which is bound to take several decades. The same with the UK and Sellafield. Germany and Asse. The only reason Russia is not on this list is because they don't give a fuck about the enviroment or the people.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in the US, currently the only large-scale terminal storage in the world, had a single storage drum leaking because they put the wrong kind of cat litter into it (yes, seriously) in 2014. It cost more than 2 billion Dollars to clean up the mess and took 3 years during which normal operation had to be shut down. A single drum did that. Of the tens of thousands we cart around every year.

We have no fucking clue about how to handle nuclear waste safely. We have yet to come up with a long-term solution, which is a bit troubling, given that plutonium compounds are highly toxic and radioactive and will be around for millions of years. If we were to mass-rollout nuclear energy to the consumer level - shit would get bonkers *real* fast.

>>1806066
Because it's very expensive, that's the main reason. I'm massively pro nuclear but the capital required to build a even a small nuclear power station is enormous, plus subsidies are usually required to make the build economical to the operator in the long term.

>>1806218
Going on from this ignorant simpletons will tell you the main reason more aren't built is because of safety and environmental concerns but that is false, nuclear is objectively less damaging in the long term than any other type of baseload power generation method and lobbyists easily convince governments of this when funding is available. The crucial element involved is cost.

Lockheed Martin fusion reactor when?!

>>1806101
>Fucking wind turbines kill more people every year than nuclear power has killed in history.

Been trying to find a reliable source for this. Do you have one? Genuinely curious.

>>1806205

First, it's thousands of years, not millions. And the fissile products of other usable heavy elements, like Thorium, don't take thousands of years to become safe.

>>1806575
>First, it's thousands of years, not millions.
>Thorium

Let's not quote-mine. The full passage is
>plutonium compounds are highly toxic and radioactive and will be around for millions of years.
I'm not talking about anything but Plutonium and Plutonium-239 has a half-life of around 25,000 years. And as of 2017 we have yet to determine a safety threshold for Plutonium, meaning that we consider even exposure with a single atom as not safe for human health.
Sure, after a million years we'll have passed 40 half-lives and there will be barely anything left. But it's not completely gone. Which means to the best of our current knowledge it will not be safe in a million years or anytime soon beyond that.

But even talking about other compounds, even just for the argument's sake going down to hundreds of years of health hazard - that's a fuck-lot of time. 500 years ago Europeans had barely discovered the Americas and 98% of people spent their day farming and sleeping in huts. That's one hell of a legacy for whatever civilisation will be in another 500 years. And we're about to make determinations about long-term safety barely half a century after first discovering the technology. Do you honestly think this will go well and we'll just happen to come up with something that works for the next 10k years - more time than humans spent sedentary so far? Good fucking luck.

If we cannot abstain completely, I'm with the scientists who advocate accessible storage. Don't bury it somewhere in leaky steel drums covered in tons of salt where nobody'll know what's going on and people will in time forget about it. That just creates more waste and problems. Just pile it somewhere dry and safe and maintain sealed enclosures. It'll still be a shitty legacy, but at least not a hidden or unknown danger. And maybe in a few hundred years they'll be glad to recover it and re-use it or neutralize it for good. Digging holes, putting waste in and filling them up is not a solution.

>>1806623

I agree with you, desu. I was just engaging in le black science man pedantry.

>>1806101
>because it was made defective.
not really the thing is it was bad design more than defective build. they used graphite as moderation and light water coolant. and the control rods were manually operated. the crew didn't knew the design specifics of the reactor and they were not only badly trained but had all the wrong motivations in place to operate it safely.

basically the russians did everything in their power for it to go wrong and still took a while.

>>1806101
Fukushima actually suffered next to no damage from the earthquake. All Jap reactors are built on solid rock and fitted to survive rollercoaster levels of ground acceleration. The reactors also scrammed automatically, about an hour before shit went down.

What went wrong was that they never improved the 15ft seawall despite developing evidence (c. 1983) that it was too low. The tsunami was about twice that height, and the basement flooded, killing all of the relevant generators. The backup generators were on a hill, but the junction boxes were in the basement because TEPCO was run by lazy morons.

Even given all of that, it wasn't much worse than Three Mile Island. The concrete shell did its job.
About 150,000 people should have returned to their homes almost immediately, but the government was too busy telling the entire Japanese diaspora to take responsibility.

>>1806777
really if the people operating the plant knew it better understood the implications of the design decisions (which tried to minimize cost and maximize power) it would have never happened even with all the "flaws" in design.

if you let stupid apes operate even the most foolproof system they will find a way to fuck it up. why don't we just let drunken truck drivers with zero flight hours outside of simulators run commercial flights? it was kinda that bad.