This may be a “hot” one, considering lots of people do not like anything nuclear. If you would want to know my “bias”, well I have always been “pro nuclear”. So if you want to take this claim with huge mountains of salts, feel free to do so.

Here is a relevant wiki article for radiation hormesis. This is a proposed effect that certain amounts of radiation exposure may even be beneficial instead of harmful as LNT may suggest.

TL;DW for folks who do not want to watch video (I have not included examples or numbers)

  • Radiation from natural sources (like radioactive bananas you eat, or from soil or space) are always present.

  • Most nuclear safety guidelines consider that there are no “safe limits” of exposure to radiation. For example, there are safe limits of some metals in our body, there is no limit for mercury or lead exposure. There is a required amount of vitamins you need, but there is also a limit beyond which they are not safe. Radiation is treated like mercury in guidelines.

  • If it has no safe limits, then due to natural exposure, places with higher background exposure must have naturally higher rates of cancers developing - but the thing is, experiments and data collected does not match.

  • Your body has natural means to repair damage done by radiation, and below a certain limit, your body can withstand (and arguably benefit, see the linked article) the radiation.

  • Over estimating danger due to radiation leads to large scale paranoia, and leads to general public be scared of nuclear disasters, when they are not as bad ast they may seem.

And pre-emptively answering some questions I am expecting to get

  • Do you support nuclear bombs? Hell no. We should stop making all kinds of bombs, not just nuclear.

Are there not better means of renewable energy generation like

  • solar? - no, you still need rare erath metals, you need good quality silicon, and you need a lot of area. Until we have a big “stability” bump in perovskite solar cells, it is not the best way. is it better than fossil fuel? everything is better than fossil fuel for practical purposes.

  • wind? geothermal? - actually pretty good. but limited to certain geographies. if you can make them, they are often the best options.

  • hydro? - dams? not so much. There are places where they kinda make sense, for example really high mountains with barely any wildlife or people. otherwise, they disturb the ecosystem a lot, and also not very resistant to things like earthquakes or flooding, and in those situations, they worsen the sitaution.

  • sga@piefed.socialOPEnglish
    51·
    2 days ago

    what’s the hypothetical other option here?

    this is not even about safety limits, the whole discussion is that currently the model says it’s never safe. what that means is that all people try to avoid it. all people get scared when it goes above some arbitrarily low limits.

    if we raise the limits, we also tell people that yeah there are safe limits, and there is no need to be immediately paranoid. simultaneously, it allows us to adapt some existing coal power plants to be conveerted to nuclear. that can already be done, by currently the radiation limit is very low, and ironically, coal plants emit more radiation already. if you can convert existing infra, it reduces cost.

    Even if you removed all safety requirements

    nobody is even asking for that. we need limits. if not, people will be immediately get lazy (read industries not spending on safety for profit margins) and accidents would increase.

    nuclear has a image problem. it is always presented as - better than coal, but not good for health. environmentalist dislike it for some “damages it cause to world” but the exposure is very low, as suggested in video. it needs a pr team essentially.

    The reality is solar just wins in cost

    it does not. a centralised nuclear power plant is a lot more energy dense. a small to medium scale nuclear plant will generate more power in some amount of time, as much as a few hectare of solar plant. it is simply because solar energy generation is inefficient (20-25%) and is expensive. it does not run day and night, and power generation is not constant thorough out the year.

    solar is currently cheap mostly for the same reason as plastic are cheap - we get raw materials for free. you need high quality silicon, which requires finest of sands (average beach sand does not mean the criterion). you need silver, you need electrode material (for example, nickel or cobalt). for small scale, like housing, solar is fine. you can get one for your roof. but it is not going to keep getting cheaper. it is practically at minima already. battery tech is imroving, and will do for longer, but panels are likely not going to get any cheaper until perovskite happen.

    cheaper superconducting links

    one - that is not happening (before fusion). on a morre serious note - what does super conductivity solve? super conductivity is going to make only a few things better - whenever you want to do some action against some resistive force essentially. it does not help in any situation, where forces involved are conservative (non dissipiative).

    • Dimand@aussie.zone
      4·
      1 day ago

      It is about safety limits in the sense that we should not be changing them to solve a PR issue. The accepted principle is ALARA. Governments do allow radiation generating devices and infrastructure usually in that framework. The PR issue is not a result of this safety framework, really it’s more of an education problem. Most people will never understand radiation or statistics well enough to have a good grasp on this. But I think it is getting better. Most people I talk to take issue with the cost of nuclear more than the radiation, especially here in Aus where we have no existing industry. My understanding is even the French are struggling to keep it economically viable, especially when it’s dry.

      Energy density should have little to do with cost. We have a lot of empty space, and we really don’t need to capture all that much sunlight even with 20% efficiency. 20% is just fine when photons from the sun are free. The true cost savings with solar is not in the panel cost, it’s that a dozen people with a TAFE degree can build a 500 MW generator in a paddock in 3 months, that operates with minimal maintenance. Nothing can beat this.

      Economically viable superconducting links are indeed a long way off but I would bet we see them before commercial fusion. In fact, we already have, they exist in a number of grids, mostly as tests and demonstrations. In east coast Aus, we lose close to 50% of our generated power to transmission lines. You take away transmission loss, and you can build a global grid. Aus can power the EU and NA in their nights with solar. It’s never cloudy everywhere at the same time.