- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@piefed.social
- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@piefed.social
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Explanation: While it’s sometimes considered that the Chornobyl disaster is proof of the danger of nuclear power - and it is certainly proof of the dangers possible when things do go wrong - it’s often understated that the core cause of the disaster was… immense incompetence. It was all incredibly avoidable from start to finish.
The best argument i have seen towards this (not my own) is that human incompetence is almost inevitable and nuclear power is to dangerous precisely because of that.
Personally i believe we can do better but its an understandable perspective.
People who point out the theoretical risks of nuclear energy are often quick to dismiss the realized harms of fossil fuels. And I don’t just mean long term climate effects, but the directly attributable estimated deaths.
I think the small number of actual nuclear incidents, and the exceptional circumstances they happened in, shows that nuclear power can be safe - certainly safer than freely spewing fossil fuels into the atmosphere. The real issue, to my eyes, is whether it’s economical now.
Considering the rapid advance of renewables, the idea of building new nuclear power plants probably does not have a large role to play going forward. Nuclear power is expensive to build, get up and running, and then put all the security safeguards up. If memory serves at present it’s no longer cheaper than renewables, just cheaper than fossil fuels.
Not even that, true cost of nuclear power was nearly always more than fossils or same. Governments were just very interested in having it for … other reasons and subsidied it to make it viable.
, image source: wikipedia
The counter argument to nuclear power is not that “nuclear power” is unsafe.
It’s that “everyone involved with nuclear power, are incompetent, greedy fucks, who sabotage a maybe potentially safe technology for potential monetary gain and because incompetence and greed can’t be prevented, nuclear power will stay unsafe, regardless of technological progress.”
It’s not that you can’t sufficiently engineer the thing itself. You can’t engineer the people who run it, ever.
Cleanup for the first turned off nuclear reactor is going into it’s third decade in Germany and won’t be done for another 40 years. All tax money. And that’s without a disaster.
As counter argument: How often would you say has humanity managed to create a political system that does not promote incompetent people pleaser over the span of, let’s say 100 years.
As far as I am aware, over that time span all systems, even those started with the best intentions, were corrupted. And as you said yourself: it is certainly proof of the dangers possible when things do go wrong.
Edit: and before somebody accuses me of defending climate change: yes, closing nuclear non at risk plants while keeping fossil fuel plants open is stupid. But investing in nuclear now instead of cheaper and far less dangerous renewables is just slightly less stupid.
As counter argument: How often would you say has humanity managed to create a political system that does not promote incompetent people pleaser over the span of, let’s say 100 years.
It’s all about the intensity of promotion of incompetent people pleasers that’s prioritized. When a system, like that of the Soviets, is built on misreporting numbers on a massive scale from top to bottom, even internal Soviet institutions could struggle to figure out even a rough approximation of what the truth was rather than what everyone down the line thought their superiors wanted to hear. A poor ability to actually record, verify, and process information was also involved.
It’s a very specific and toxic mix of institutional cultures and disincentives (how would you like to go back to the slums doing hard labor, comrade, with access to the special stores with basic consumer goods revoked? There is no job search available for you if you piss off your superior; you can consider yourself blacklisted and, like all good Soviet citizens, restricted to the Soviet Union for any future prospects), very much related to the ‘dictator’s dilemma’, which is notable (and named) precisely because it does not generally have lasting currency in less-authoritarian systems. Even a fairly low rate of political turnover overall is deeply damaging to the ability of such vranyo to perpetuate itself as a norm.
No system is perfect. But some systems are worse than others. No system provides justice, but some systems are certainly more unjust than others. No system prevents incompetence entirely - but only some systems enable it on such a scale and intensity that even deeply technical fields are rotted down to their very ability to regulate their own functioning, even at the knowing risk to the operators’ own lives.
About your edit it’s worth noting that Germany’s nuclear plants were ancient, and were actually kept in operation beyond their design life. They would’ve needed to close anyway, and soon. The question was always about how to replace them. And considering just how long it takes to plan and build commercial nuclear plants that question was answered definitively back decades ago when we stopped building new ones.
All I’m saying is, we can’t do solar panels wrong enough to show up on emergency sensors five countries downwind.
Challenge accepted?
And giving the CIA the encryption keys so they can read all our private messages and user data on major online platforms is fine as long as they use these responsibly.
Nuclear’s strongest argument is that conservatives aren’t rabidly opposing it, which is fucking stupid of course. But it’s a middle ground compromise so leftists rabidly oppose it.
Nuclear’s strongest argument is that conservatives aren’t rabidly opposing it,
Don’t worry, they broke out the ‘national security’ card whenever expansion of nuclear plants was proposed to take over more of the grid load from their precious fossil fuels.
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