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1 Fukushima is too many, no?



No. Fukushima is a price I'd gladly pay and I expect every reasonable person to agree.

The alternative isn't "no Fukushima", the alternative is hundreds of thousands deaths per year by burning coal. It's just not "one huge bang" so people don't realize it, because understanding abstract dangers is hard.


Absolutely.

The Fukushima disaster: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_di...

The earthquake: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_...

Zero known fatal injuries out of 20,000 were caused by the reactor.

If I've done the math right, a nominally operative coal plant over Fukishima's 40 year lifetime would have caused 5ish deaths.

Fukishima did cause a few cases of cancer, but so does nominally operative coal.

People can gripe about tail risks from environmental pollution when it's not displacing a worse modal risk. Right now it's unreasonable to. Proliferation risk is concerning; most of the rest is just scale insensitivity.


Nukes' competition is not coal. It is renewables. Comparing to coal is tendentious and disingenuous, not to say dishonest.


Not really m. Something has to provide power when the sun and wind aren’t available. Right now that’s natural gas, coal, hydro, or nuclear.


"Right now". Right now all the nuke plants you are talking about don't exist, so produce exactly 0 watts.


We’ll there is a good deal in some places.


For now, until their production cost exceeds alternatives. Then they will be mothballed.


Pumped storage and grid scale batteries provide that at much cheaper cost overall.

Nowhere near as much is needed as people think either.


that assumes grid scale batteries exist that can back up power for 10-16 hours a day at a time and those don't exist.


Where are grid scale batteries doing that today?


California, Hawaii, Australia.

In hawaii they canceled a proposed inter-island power connector because batteries + solar were just cheaper.

Pumped storage is generally a lot more economic and can store a lot more than batteries but it cant be built quite as quickly & is somewhat geographically dependent. It takes 4-5 years to deploy rather than months.


Before a thing has been built, it needs to be built. Do you need this explained further?

The overwhelming bulk of utility storage will not be batteries, because that is the most expensive alternative. Utility storage will be whatever is cheap and locally practical.


That’s basically what I meant.


Just improve decentralized energy storage and micro-grids.


You should look up the cost (in whatever metric you like: dollars, lives, cancers, etc.) and compare it to coal. Don't forget to normalize, since coal is much more common than nuclear power.

The results will likely surprise you.




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