I only mean it’s a false claim to imply that wind/water/solar energy are inherently zero catastrophe risk.
That said, I think coming close to fully understanding and assessing (and mitigating) the risk of wind/water/solar power projects/economies is far more achievable than for nuclear energy projects/economies.
Especially so when considering the unavoidable context of the (un)predictability of both humans and environment over the next 10,000 - 100,000 years.
There are no risks, even if the damn breaks, just do not build you house underneath or near it and water is not the only option, you just took water as an example because this is possible the first thing that comes up if you google it, not telling that in most cases no one died in your examples. Of course, people could and maybe actually died building some damns … e.g. in China or died because of breakages but that was a result of bad maintenance or because people had their house near the damn. If you know it is a risk to live there you do not build your house there this is just common sense, but in lots of cases the govt decided, lets build a damn there without asking for approval or permission. Point here is that its more secure than living next to nuclear power plant which has statistical a history of health problems and cancer risks, a damn can only break and that is it, theoretical chance here is much higher that once you are near a power plant die of cancer than the chance that damn breaks and you die because of that.
These are also not considered a disaster per definition, cause you can rebuild the damn, improve it, get some water back into it. It is cheaper to maintain a damn regularly than spending billions of billions of dollars for storing barrels underground and maintain them.
Build damn, make sure no one lives near by or under it, it is really that easy. In china the deaths are usually because govt decided to build it there and people refused to leave their homes, in lots of cases government gave them a chance to move to another location and people refused because some people are stubborn.
If nuclear power plant explodes and you are not nearby you still be affected one way or another, which is the underlying truth here.
You don’t build a conclusion for a technology based on sweeping aside risks of your favoured solution while emphasising the risks of your favoured solution, which is what you did with your “There are zero catastrophes with[…]” comment.
You lay it all out and compare the whole model.
I think laying it all out for wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear, will raise a whole lot of issues with all the technologies. Some specific models of tech will have unresolvable issues (e.g, megadams, dense solar-farms on arable land, any nuclear tech which can feed proliferation).
I suspect the whole supply/waste-chain for nuclear will have unresolvable issues, and very few of the hydro/solar will have unresolvable issues.
Trouble is getting people to agree on how to compare the risk of a well-engineered dam failing and the risk of your nuclear waste storage leaking into the water table, or a contaminated coolant pipe spraying vapour into the prevailing wind, or radioactive contaminated scrap metal making its way into the commercial steel market, or…
Anyone suggesting the thorium-pebble-bed or similar “holy-grail” 100% safe theoretical tech seems to be living between fantasy and pipe-dream.
I do not expressed any conclusion, I argued on the given example that is not even comparable to the danger of what nuclear energy comes with, we do not even started the topic here, there is the fact that this can be used with some effort to build bombs, that you need to store the waste over so many years that no one … really no one can comprehend this, then there will be climate based disaster, we will run out of uranium, there will be political changes and so many other factors that we have not even talked about and I have absolute no interest because this whole defending of a toxic system leads to nothing and no one can change my mind here.
There is no risk if you apply common sense. In nuclear energy case, you cannot escape or apply counter measures because they need to be constantly cooled which brings us to the point that you need to build them near water or water resources and if something goes wrong, like in Fukushima, stuff will leak one way or another into the ocean, lake or other water resources you prefer. This is not the case with renewable energies sources, you turn them off, they are off, that is it, they by itself posses no danger.
I talked about disasters and catastrophes and there are none with renewable, again you turn it off and it is off and no further damages will come to anyone. Claiming human error implies a disaster applies to everything and is not per-see a disaster. The water example here does not scale a single bit because most of the cases are from 19th. century, others killed no one and in lots of cases human error applied here, lack of maintenance etc. A nuclear power plant typically, due to its nature gets more maintenance, remove this part and put the maintenance into the damn and there will be no human error which causes problems assuming you applied common sense and evacuate all people around it even if it breaks. The keyword here is risk management and not hybris. There will be of course earthquakes and other unpredictable events and it will hit the next nuclear power plant and the next damn, but the risk here for a damn except that you need to rebuild it after it breaks is none existing. Again they still need to cool Fukushima and again the water for the cooling process still goes straight into the ocean. What you prefer, the nuclear BS or rebuilding a damn, I prefer last thing each time friend.
There is and there never will be any end solution for nuclear waste, this is the bottom line. Even newer generators still need cooling, still produce waste and still depend on resources that run for maximum 1000 years. There is nothing to debate here. NOTHING. I already linked the research in other threads and you can cry here all day, will not change and I already used very very optimistic numbers and rounded it up and not down. In is even more likely that we deplete resources much much faster in the next 200 years.
nuclear energy is one of the safest methods of power generation, with literally hundreds of times less deaths per energy unit compared to fossil fuels, which cause tens of millions of deaths through air pollution
This is compared against coal and not renewable energy sources. Water, like we talked about produces no air pollution compared to coal. We also did not talked about fossil fuels, the thing is uranium will run out in next 130 years.
Air pollution is in general a human created problem. Most pollution is created in and around bigger cities and industries, this is irrelevant to our discussion here as there is no scientific proof possible when car based pollution and coal based industrial pollution causes what exactly and how many people die since both mixes in the air.
in most cases, shutting down nuclear power plants causes deaths, not prevents them, because to some degree their power generation capacity is going to be replaced with fossil fuels, which are, again, orders of magnitude more deadly
I call BS, cancer statistic are rising since nuclear power plants, there lots of statistics that your chance to get cancer near power plant raises dramatically and and and. We are also not talking here about replacements or fossil fuels, we are talking about green energy. Earth heat for example, which constantly works and there is no limit, of course even the universe has limits but it does not run out in the next 100k years.
I said everything here I had to say and people downplay it, which I expected. Nothing people can bring forward is new to me and nothing will change my mind as some fundamental problems and threats that nuclear energy comes with can be solved and this is the reason I blocked the community, and I am out now here from the discussion, since I cannot extract any useful information that brings us any step forward. People tend to downplay it or find weaknesses in renewable, this is not what I am interested in. I am interested in showing that nuclear energy is not an end-solution and that is has huge dangers, which I did now and no one here claims that we have the perfect alternatives overnight. It is a team-play effort and I am shocked to see that people still supporting nuclear energy. I at least expected that we come to an common ground that nuclear based energy sources are not the answer and that we should go other ways, also to keep peace on earth and maybe even get rid of nuclear weapons but this is me - an idealistic fool, sadly people still think that nuclear is the way to go.
I call it madness and genocide.
Doing the same thing and expect different results - definition of craziness. - A. Einstein.
I only mean it’s a false claim to imply that wind/water/solar energy are inherently zero catastrophe risk.
That said, I think coming close to fully understanding and assessing (and mitigating) the risk of wind/water/solar power projects/economies is far more achievable than for nuclear energy projects/economies.
Especially so when considering the unavoidable context of the (un)predictability of both humans and environment over the next 10,000 - 100,000 years.
There are no risks, even if the damn breaks, just do not build you house underneath or near it and water is not the only option, you just took water as an example because this is possible the first thing that comes up if you google it, not telling that in most cases no one died in your examples. Of course, people could and maybe actually died building some damns … e.g. in China or died because of breakages but that was a result of bad maintenance or because people had their house near the damn. If you know it is a risk to live there you do not build your house there this is just common sense, but in lots of cases the govt decided, lets build a damn there without asking for approval or permission. Point here is that its more secure than living next to nuclear power plant which has statistical a history of health problems and cancer risks, a damn can only break and that is it, theoretical chance here is much higher that once you are near a power plant die of cancer than the chance that damn breaks and you die because of that.
These are also not considered a disaster per definition, cause you can rebuild the damn, improve it, get some water back into it. It is cheaper to maintain a damn regularly than spending billions of billions of dollars for storing barrels underground and maintain them.
Build damn, make sure no one lives near by or under it, it is really that easy. In china the deaths are usually because govt decided to build it there and people refused to leave their homes, in lots of cases government gave them a chance to move to another location and people refused because some people are stubborn.
If nuclear power plant explodes and you are not nearby you still be affected one way or another, which is the underlying truth here.
You don’t build a conclusion for a technology based on sweeping aside risks of your favoured solution while emphasising the risks of your favoured solution, which is what you did with your “There are zero catastrophes with[…]” comment.
You lay it all out and compare the whole model.
I think laying it all out for wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear, will raise a whole lot of issues with all the technologies. Some specific models of tech will have unresolvable issues (e.g, megadams, dense solar-farms on arable land, any nuclear tech which can feed proliferation).
I suspect the whole supply/waste-chain for nuclear will have unresolvable issues, and very few of the hydro/solar will have unresolvable issues.
Trouble is getting people to agree on how to compare the risk of a well-engineered dam failing and the risk of your nuclear waste storage leaking into the water table, or a contaminated coolant pipe spraying vapour into the prevailing wind, or radioactive contaminated scrap metal making its way into the commercial steel market, or…
Anyone suggesting the thorium-pebble-bed or similar “holy-grail” 100% safe theoretical tech seems to be living between fantasy and pipe-dream.
I do not expressed any conclusion, I argued on the given example that is not even comparable to the danger of what nuclear energy comes with, we do not even started the topic here, there is the fact that this can be used with some effort to build bombs, that you need to store the waste over so many years that no one … really no one can comprehend this, then there will be climate based disaster, we will run out of uranium, there will be political changes and so many other factors that we have not even talked about and I have absolute no interest because this whole defending of a toxic system leads to nothing and no one can change my mind here.
This is compared against coal and not renewable energy sources. Water, like we talked about produces no air pollution compared to coal. We also did not talked about fossil fuels, the thing is uranium will run out in next 130 years.
Air pollution is in general a human created problem. Most pollution is created in and around bigger cities and industries, this is irrelevant to our discussion here as there is no scientific proof possible when car based pollution and coal based industrial pollution causes what exactly and how many people die since both mixes in the air.
I call BS, cancer statistic are rising since nuclear power plants, there lots of statistics that your chance to get cancer near power plant raises dramatically and and and. We are also not talking here about replacements or fossil fuels, we are talking about green energy. Earth heat for example, which constantly works and there is no limit, of course even the universe has limits but it does not run out in the next 100k years.
I said everything here I had to say and people downplay it, which I expected. Nothing people can bring forward is new to me and nothing will change my mind as some fundamental problems and threats that nuclear energy comes with can be solved and this is the reason I blocked the community, and I am out now here from the discussion, since I cannot extract any useful information that brings us any step forward. People tend to downplay it or find weaknesses in renewable, this is not what I am interested in. I am interested in showing that nuclear energy is not an end-solution and that is has huge dangers, which I did now and no one here claims that we have the perfect alternatives overnight. It is a team-play effort and I am shocked to see that people still supporting nuclear energy. I at least expected that we come to an common ground that nuclear based energy sources are not the answer and that we should go other ways, also to keep peace on earth and maybe even get rid of nuclear weapons but this is me - an idealistic fool, sadly people still think that nuclear is the way to go.
I call it madness and genocide.
Doing the same thing and expect different results - definition of craziness. - A. Einstein.