5 ms·

If it is Prometheus' fire, we are not ready to handle that fire yet. When one of the core concerns of using a technology is to prevent it being used to create w

If it is Prometheus' fire, we are not ready to handle that fire yet. When one of the core concerns of using a technology is to prevent it being used to create weapons capable of obliterating entire cities, we are not as a species mature enough to use it on a wider scale. This is only one example of why we are not ready yet. Nuclear (fission) technology is not the problem, we are the problem. Looking at the recent history of political leadership all over the world, and the baffling level of support even the most immature of policies have, it's clear we have a ways to go. Most people doesn't even seem to realize that as a species we've only just emerged, we're so young. Toddlers on any timescale but the most naïve and short sighted.

VortexDream 5y ago
Either we use it and learn to use it or we wipe out wide swathes of the human population over the next hundred years. I'm sure the millions who die and suffer over the next few decades will be grateful to your absolute principles.
denton-scratch 5y ago
The issue that concerns me about nuclear power isn't so much weapons (they tend to be well-guarded, and it's hard to make weapons from reactor fuel), but decomissioning. The UK was one of the first countries to build nuclear reactors; no UK reactor has ever been fully decomissioned, and from what I can see we haven't even got a strategy - WP says they're still working out whether decomissioning should occur over a 20-year or a 100-year span. The UK's first nuclear reactor, Calder Hall, was built in the year of my birth, and decommissioning is estimated to take well into the next century; my grandchildren will have died of old age. You can stand next to a thermonuclear bomb without a mickey-mouse suit; you can even open it up, take the components out, and render the weapon unusable, fairly easily. Nuclear reactors, not so much. I have grandchildren under 5. Until we've proved that a reactor design can be fully decommissioned, I don't think we should build more. That's not a problem that I want to dump on their shoulders.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  What sort of world will your grandchildren inherit if we don’t invest in nuclear? What happens if the mystery renewable energy storage and carbon scrubbing technologies never materialize? What happens if the climate scientists are right about the increasing droughts and floods and the knock-on effects to food supplies and so on? By comparison the risk of nuclear is negligible.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    > if we don’t invest in nuclear? That depends. The trajectory we're on is one of unrestrained economic growth. In that scenario, demand for power will only increase. Growth has many other harmful effects, including ever-greater quantities of plastic waste, and depletion of natural resources like fish stocks and rainforests. I have no idea how to tame growth. Most governments put growth near the top of their objectives. But I think it's growth that will blight my grandchildren's lives, not a shortage of electricity.
- ksec 5y ago
  Am I missing something? Why is decommissioning nuclear power plants the problem here? There are plenty of nuclear power plants that has been decommissioned. So this is nothing new.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    In the UK, several nukes have been taken out of service; none has been "decommissioned", in the sense that the site can be re-used, people can live and work there. The first nuclear power plant in the UK was built in 1956, and the current plan is that decommissioning will be completed by 2104; I will be long gone. Until then, the site will be closed to the public. Perhaps you know of nuclear power plants elsewhere that have been fully decommissioned. I don't, but there is an infinite number of things I don't know, and I would love to be surprised.
bombcar 5y ago
So we’ll slowly level cities via burning coal instead “in the name of safety”.
vlovich123 5y ago
I'm unclear about what your point is. Are you saying that Nuclear power production is somehow linked to nuclear arms production?
- throwaway898989 5y ago
  are you saying that nuclear power related accidents like chernobyl don't happen?
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    That seems like a little bit of a non sequitur to the topic in this particular thread chain. Anyway, yes of course they happen. They happen in every power producing industry. It's hard to find good numbers of course as there's going to be some amount of error, but here's one [1]. The point isn't that in that report nuclear has fewer deaths than wind and solar as I'm sure that will cause an emotional reaction. The point is that it's so low and comparable. Even if it was 10x worse it would be worth the tradeoff of replacing coal. Nuclear is our only choice for replacing industrial scale use of coal and oil. It's unfortunate that that's the case, but those are the facts on the ground currently and there's no sign of that ever changing. The way Wind and Solar generate energy are wholly incompatible with high temperature industrial uses where coal and natural gas are used let alone the problems of variability (batteries help, but there are limits and batter manufacturing at scale brings its own challenges). If you're comparing Nuclear to Wind and Solar power generation, you're comparing power sources that don't compete. Nuclear is about replacing the worst problems coal and oil present us and staving off global warming. It's an extremely critical and underdeveloped resource and only gets safer and better with time. It would be erroneous to state any risk in a vacuum - you have to compare it with what's happening today. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      To boot, almost every time a nuclear reactor is decommissioned, it is replaced by more fossil fuel plants, not by renewable energy. You can’t be seriously opposed to climate change and nuclear energy at the same time.
TheDudeMan 5y ago
Regardless of whether the big carbon-producing nations use nuclear power, they will stock nuclear bombs. Thermonuclear, in fact.
prox 5y ago
I wonder what the pathway would be (in a perfect everything-matures-at-a-constant-rate way) Probably better representative systems that don’t pit countries or peoples against eachother. A way to identify as a human or earthling above all nationalities. A revolutionary better economic understanding so we don’t have to choose politically and have clear economic growth tied to wellness of people. Probably connected to the above is a superior education system for everyone who wants to and help to realize mature atomic sciences.
q1w2 5y ago
Running a nuclear reactor does not produce nuclear weapons. This is simply fear-mongering fake news. Also, modern nuclear reactors are dangerous. The GenIII+ specification for all new reactors requires the use of passive shut off. Which means the operator must actively keep the reactor on. If they were to all turn into zombies, for example, the reactor would simply shut off. Omega Tau podcast also did an extensive series on nuclear waste storage that I highly recommend every skeptic listen to. Nuclear waste storage is not a problem. The problem is that naivete people seem to have that renewables can provide 99% uptime baseload, the boomer ignorance that all-things-nuclear-are-bad-because-Greenpeace-told-me-so. Moreover, China has proven that nuclear Gen III reactors can be built cheaply - they are concurrently building 24 1GW plants. Steamline ancient western regulations, block the endless lawsuits against plant development, re-open the Nevada storage center, tell boomers to stop stonewalling the only ready climate change solution, and BUILD THE DAMN NUCLEAR PLANTS. We have a PROVEN solution ready to go that can be deployed in literally 10-15 years. We just need to end the ignorance.
- chefkoch 5y ago
  > We have a PROVEN solution ready to go that can be deployed in literally 10-15 years. We just need to end the ignorance. No we don't. We don't have even one new Gen reactor running and even more important we don't have the people educated to build them in a massive scale. It would take at least ten years to educate the nuclear engineers needed to build dozens or even hundreds of them. And even then they don't have experience, they are juniors building very complex multi billion dollar installations.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > We don't have even one new Gen reactor running Which is the generation is the "new" one? There are a number of Generation III ones running: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor Gen IV reactor used to burn up plutonium: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor
    - 5y ago
lokimedes 5y ago
I tend to agree with you, but it should not be the conclusion. We must become ready to handle this, it is in my opinion the real underlying challenge behind the climate problem. We have started this technologically driven expansion of the human footprint, and either we revert to pre-industrial levels or progress. Assuming that non-nuclear technology will let us have the cake (of prosperity) and eat it too (without drowning our cites) is the collective lie I see propagated politically. In the spirit of the recent TV series release of "Foundation", this is our Seldon problem.
mihaaly 5y ago
How about airplanes and internal combustion engines? Those are weaponised with track record off killing millions and millions. Should we immediately throw away those as well?
jjoonathan 5y ago
If we hadn't stopped building nuclear power in the 80s and had merely kept up the pace, our electric grid would be 100% decarbonized by now. Instead, we do have nukes and don't have a carbon free grid. Ditto everyone else. Naïve, immature, and short sighted, indeed.
- Gwypaas 5y ago
  A negative learning curve coupled with Chernobyl doesn't create a very compelling business case right at the end of the 80s. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
throw0101a 5y ago
> If it is Prometheus' fire, we are not ready to handle that fire yet. If we should only be allowed to use technology when we fully understand its consequences, then we should still be living as hunter gatherers (agriculture). Heck, most people don't understand how wood has shaped humanity: * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Age-of-Wood/Roland-Ennos/9781982114732 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Age-of-Wood/Rolan... See also Marshall McLuhan: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan
robwwilliams 5y ago
Brilliant comment. And yet we as a barely intelligent emergent species will play with politically dangerous fire/energy. Let do it more as a basic science challenge and work 10X harder on the fusion chimera that is beginning to look real!
MR4D 5y ago
> When one of the core concerns of using a technology is to prevent it being used to create weapons capable of obliterating entire cities, we are not as a species mature enough to use it on a wider scale. Just wanted to point out that stone (trebuchets), wood (arrows), bronze (swords), and steel (guns, bombs, tanks, etc) fall into this category too. Silicon is probably there already as well, but hasn’t been used yet. Mankind has used everything as his disposal to gain the upper hand over another group of humans since well before history began. I don’t ever expect it to stop.
ashtonkem 5y ago
1) We already have a ton of nuclear weapons laying around, without even getting the upside of lots of electricity. Stopping nuclear power to avoid nuclear proliferation has not worked. 2) The alternative for lots of the world is coal. Between letting the Germans have access to refined Uranium (not highly refined) and letting the Germans continue to burn coal, I’d take the former. 3) This argument falls apart once you realize how little we’ve invested in Thorium reactors, which don’t post a nuclear proliferation risk. I think that the ugly reality is that fossil fuel companies have cynically co-opted legitimate fears about nuclear power (and there are legitimate concerns) in order to shut them down or push them off into “we can use them once <impossible condition> has been met” specifically because nuclear power is the only serious threat to their continued profits.
simion314 5y ago
>using a technology is to prevent it being used to create weapons capable of obliterating entire cities, we are not as a species mature enough to use it on a wider scale. This is only one example of why we are not ready yet. So now this big countries like US,Russia and the rest still have the bombs, you don't reduce the risk of a nuclear war or a big country accidentally or intentional detonating one by reducing the number of nuclear power plants. Unfortunately the nuclear weapons already exist and any country with enough budget can create one, I suggest you try to understand that you can't have a group of terrorists dropping a plane in a nuclear plant and have it explode like a bomb, nuclear plants do not explode like an atomic bomb.

VortexDream 5y ago

Either we use it and learn to use it or we wipe out wide swathes of the human population over the next hundred years. I'm sure the millions who die and suffer over the next few decades will be grateful to your absolute principles.

denton-scratch 5y ago

The issue that concerns me about nuclear power isn't so much weapons (they tend to be well-guarded, and it's hard to make weapons from reactor fuel), but decomissioning. The UK was one of the first countries to build nuclear reactors; no UK reactor has ever been fully decomissioned, and from what I can see we haven't even got a strategy - WP says they're still working out whether decomissioning should occur over a 20-year or a 100-year span. The UK's first nuclear reactor, Calder Hall, was built in the year of my birth, and decommissioning is estimated to take well into the next century; my grandchildren will have died of old age. You can stand next to a thermonuclear bomb without a mickey-mouse suit; you can even open it up, take the components out, and render the weapon unusable, fairly easily. Nuclear reactors, not so much. I have grandchildren under 5. Until we've proved that a reactor design can be fully decommissioned, I don't think we should build more. That's not a problem that I want to dump on their shoulders.

throwaway894345 5y ago
What sort of world will your grandchildren inherit if we don’t invest in nuclear? What happens if the mystery renewable energy storage and carbon scrubbing technologies never materialize? What happens if the climate scientists are right about the increasing droughts and floods and the knock-on effects to food supplies and so on? By comparison the risk of nuclear is negligible.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > if we don’t invest in nuclear? That depends. The trajectory we're on is one of unrestrained economic growth. In that scenario, demand for power will only increase. Growth has many other harmful effects, including ever-greater quantities of plastic waste, and depletion of natural resources like fish stocks and rainforests. I have no idea how to tame growth. Most governments put growth near the top of their objectives. But I think it's growth that will blight my grandchildren's lives, not a shortage of electricity.
ksec 5y ago
Am I missing something? Why is decommissioning nuclear power plants the problem here? There are plenty of nuclear power plants that has been decommissioned. So this is nothing new.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  In the UK, several nukes have been taken out of service; none has been "decommissioned", in the sense that the site can be re-used, people can live and work there. The first nuclear power plant in the UK was built in 1956, and the current plan is that decommissioning will be completed by 2104; I will be long gone. Until then, the site will be closed to the public. Perhaps you know of nuclear power plants elsewhere that have been fully decommissioned. I don't, but there is an infinite number of things I don't know, and I would love to be surprised.

bombcar 5y ago

So we’ll slowly level cities via burning coal instead “in the name of safety”.

vlovich123 5y ago

I'm unclear about what your point is. Are you saying that Nuclear power production is somehow linked to nuclear arms production?

throwaway898989 5y ago
are you saying that nuclear power related accidents like chernobyl don't happen?
- vlovich123 5y ago
  That seems like a little bit of a non sequitur to the topic in this particular thread chain. Anyway, yes of course they happen. They happen in every power producing industry. It's hard to find good numbers of course as there's going to be some amount of error, but here's one [1]. The point isn't that in that report nuclear has fewer deaths than wind and solar as I'm sure that will cause an emotional reaction. The point is that it's so low and comparable. Even if it was 10x worse it would be worth the tradeoff of replacing coal. Nuclear is our only choice for replacing industrial scale use of coal and oil. It's unfortunate that that's the case, but those are the facts on the ground currently and there's no sign of that ever changing. The way Wind and Solar generate energy are wholly incompatible with high temperature industrial uses where coal and natural gas are used let alone the problems of variability (batteries help, but there are limits and batter manufacturing at scale brings its own challenges). If you're comparing Nuclear to Wind and Solar power generation, you're comparing power sources that don't compete. Nuclear is about replacing the worst problems coal and oil present us and staving off global warming. It's an extremely critical and underdeveloped resource and only gets safer and better with time. It would be erroneous to state any risk in a vacuum - you have to compare it with what's happening today. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    To boot, almost every time a nuclear reactor is decommissioned, it is replaced by more fossil fuel plants, not by renewable energy. You can’t be seriously opposed to climate change and nuclear energy at the same time.

TheDudeMan 5y ago

Regardless of whether the big carbon-producing nations use nuclear power, they will stock nuclear bombs. Thermonuclear, in fact.

prox 5y ago

I wonder what the pathway would be (in a perfect everything-matures-at-a-constant-rate way) Probably better representative systems that don’t pit countries or peoples against eachother. A way to identify as a human or earthling above all nationalities. A revolutionary better economic understanding so we don’t have to choose politically and have clear economic growth tied to wellness of people. Probably connected to the above is a superior education system for everyone who wants to and help to realize mature atomic sciences.

q1w2 5y ago

Running a nuclear reactor does not produce nuclear weapons. This is simply fear-mongering fake news. Also, modern nuclear reactors are dangerous. The GenIII+ specification for all new reactors requires the use of passive shut off. Which means the operator must actively keep the reactor on. If they were to all turn into zombies, for example, the reactor would simply shut off. Omega Tau podcast also did an extensive series on nuclear waste storage that I highly recommend every skeptic listen to. Nuclear waste storage is not a problem. The problem is that naivete people seem to have that renewables can provide 99% uptime baseload, the boomer ignorance that all-things-nuclear-are-bad-because-Greenpeace-told-me-so. Moreover, China has proven that nuclear Gen III reactors can be built cheaply - they are concurrently building 24 1GW plants. Steamline ancient western regulations, block the endless lawsuits against plant development, re-open the Nevada storage center, tell boomers to stop stonewalling the only ready climate change solution, and BUILD THE DAMN NUCLEAR PLANTS. We have a PROVEN solution ready to go that can be deployed in literally 10-15 years. We just need to end the ignorance.

chefkoch 5y ago
> We have a PROVEN solution ready to go that can be deployed in literally 10-15 years. We just need to end the ignorance. No we don't. We don't have even one new Gen reactor running and even more important we don't have the people educated to build them in a massive scale. It would take at least ten years to educate the nuclear engineers needed to build dozens or even hundreds of them. And even then they don't have experience, they are juniors building very complex multi billion dollar installations.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > We don't have even one new Gen reactor running Which is the generation is the "new" one? There are a number of Generation III ones running: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor Gen IV reactor used to burn up plutonium: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor
  - 5y ago

lokimedes 5y ago

I tend to agree with you, but it should not be the conclusion. We must become ready to handle this, it is in my opinion the real underlying challenge behind the climate problem. We have started this technologically driven expansion of the human footprint, and either we revert to pre-industrial levels or progress. Assuming that non-nuclear technology will let us have the cake (of prosperity) and eat it too (without drowning our cites) is the collective lie I see propagated politically. In the spirit of the recent TV series release of "Foundation", this is our Seldon problem.

mihaaly 5y ago

How about airplanes and internal combustion engines? Those are weaponised with track record off killing millions and millions. Should we immediately throw away those as well?

jjoonathan 5y ago

If we hadn't stopped building nuclear power in the 80s and had merely kept up the pace, our electric grid would be 100% decarbonized by now. Instead, we do have nukes and don't have a carbon free grid. Ditto everyone else. Naïve, immature, and short sighted, indeed.

Gwypaas 5y ago
A negative learning curve coupled with Chernobyl doesn't create a very compelling business case right at the end of the 80s. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

throw0101a 5y ago

> If it is Prometheus' fire, we are not ready to handle that fire yet. If we should only be allowed to use technology when we fully understand its consequences, then we should still be living as hunter gatherers (agriculture). Heck, most people don't understand how wood has shaped humanity: * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Age-of-Wood/Roland-Ennos/9781982114732 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Age-of-Wood/Rolan... See also Marshall McLuhan: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

robwwilliams 5y ago

Brilliant comment. And yet we as a barely intelligent emergent species will play with politically dangerous fire/energy. Let do it more as a basic science challenge and work 10X harder on the fusion chimera that is beginning to look real!

MR4D 5y ago

> When one of the core concerns of using a technology is to prevent it being used to create weapons capable of obliterating entire cities, we are not as a species mature enough to use it on a wider scale. Just wanted to point out that stone (trebuchets), wood (arrows), bronze (swords), and steel (guns, bombs, tanks, etc) fall into this category too. Silicon is probably there already as well, but hasn’t been used yet. Mankind has used everything as his disposal to gain the upper hand over another group of humans since well before history began. I don’t ever expect it to stop.

ashtonkem 5y ago

1) We already have a ton of nuclear weapons laying around, without even getting the upside of lots of electricity. Stopping nuclear power to avoid nuclear proliferation has not worked. 2) The alternative for lots of the world is coal. Between letting the Germans have access to refined Uranium (not highly refined) and letting the Germans continue to burn coal, I’d take the former. 3) This argument falls apart once you realize how little we’ve invested in Thorium reactors, which don’t post a nuclear proliferation risk. I think that the ugly reality is that fossil fuel companies have cynically co-opted legitimate fears about nuclear power (and there are legitimate concerns) in order to shut them down or push them off into “we can use them once <impossible condition> has been met” specifically because nuclear power is the only serious threat to their continued profits.

simion314 5y ago

>using a technology is to prevent it being used to create weapons capable of obliterating entire cities, we are not as a species mature enough to use it on a wider scale. This is only one example of why we are not ready yet. So now this big countries like US,Russia and the rest still have the bombs, you don't reduce the risk of a nuclear war or a big country accidentally or intentional detonating one by reducing the number of nuclear power plants. Unfortunately the nuclear weapons already exist and any country with enough budget can create one, I suggest you try to understand that you can't have a group of terrorists dropping a plane in a nuclear plant and have it explode like a bomb, nuclear plants do not explode like an atomic bomb.