This is an advertising problem. The political left absolutely wants only wind mills and solar panels around the world. The wind mill and solar manufacturers have successfully co-opted the political left. How come nuclear operators did not even try to do the same to the right? Propaganda/advertising works, but only if you actually participate. Perhaps engineers are simply above the idea that they have to be effective communicators?
I don't think so. I think nuclear harms are much more attention grabbing than the harms from other types of energy in the same way that shark attacks make better news stories than yearly flu deaths.
Nuclear power has tail risks that dwarf other energy sources' by many orders of magnitude. People assume the prevalence of those tail risks are higher than they actually are, but the risks are there nonetheless and they have been vividly embedded into the public imagination by Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. Proper maintenance and operation of a nuclear power plant is going to follow a distribution, and it's a mathematical fact that someone's going to get stuck with the worst-run, most accident-prone reactor. The only surefire way to avoid a nuclear meltdown in your backyard is to impose unfeasible safety standards.
From a political standpoint, it's always going to be a losing battle to convince average people that their e.g. 1% estimate of catastrophe should actually be 0.001%. The Nuclear fission industry lost the battle to convince humanity that its tail risks could be ignored when it had multiple public catastrophes, including ones as recently as 2011.
None of these were even catastrophes, though. Chernobyl was reasonably bad but still vastly better than the amount of coal it replaced, IIRC, and nobody is ever going to build anything within orders of magnitude as bad as Chernobyl ever again anywhere, let alone in the United States. Your “mathematical fact” is a rhetorical trick since it ignores the fact that the distribution from which the tail risks are drawn can and has shifted enormously over time.
None of them ended up fulfilling the true tail-risk scenario, true. That being said, consider what could have happened: Chernobyl was a day or two of heroics away from making entire countries uninhabitable, and Fukushima nearly led to the permanent abandonment of Tokyo less than 15 years ago.
In Fukushima, there was no need for any evacuation. The only immediate casualties, 50 dead, old or sick people, died of evacuation, not from any radiation.
Life is flourishing in Chernobyl, not that it ever stopped flourishing. It is perhaps not so well-known that units 1 and 2 continued to function and thousands of men continued to work there.
Really, “nearly” led to the permanent abandonment of Tokyo? Entire countries uninhabitable? Those are both four orders of magnitude worse than anything I’m aware was seriously in the cards. On an inside view I’m not unusually well-informed about these things, so do feel free to give me some sources backing those claims up, though on an outside view I’m pretty confident they can’t possibly be true. (The permanent abandonment of Tokyo would be by far the worst economic disaster in the history of modernity, damages of what, tens of trillions? More? It seems pretty hard to imagine that I would never have heard anyone but you mention it in the context of Fukushima if it were really a live possibility.)
I’ve looked into it and it looks like the truth is “led some serious people to begin to think about what it would be like to temporarily evacuate Tokyo”, which is pretty wildly different from what you said—“nearly” seems tendentious and “permanently” just a falsehood you should have been well aware of. I admit that, though you seem to be dishonestly propagandizing, the reality is scarier than I would have thought.
When the nuclear establishment talks of nothing other than safety, and how safety is their first and last priority, and how busy and earnest they are in cleaning up old, unsafe, radioactive sites, the public naturally thinks that nuclear is actually very unsafe.
If you could take the survey back in time to 17th century Salem, Massachusetts, and change the topic to "witches," you'd get the same results. For analogous reasons.
A better title for the post might have been, "What Americans Think They Know About Nuclear Power."
Nobody has tested flying a Boeing 747 airplane into a nuclear power plant to see how many states it irradiates. Nuclear disaster is a fat tail event like those that Nassim Taleb has been telling us to incorporate into our planning. The way to be antifragile is to invest in distributed, secure technologies like solar and watch The Other Guy destroy himself with nuclear. The problem is, with nuclear, The Other Guy destroys us too because we're all living under the same canopy. And today the news is that Ukraine (site of a major Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the 1980s) has lost power to its nuclear power plant. Putin controls power to the nuke plant, so they're running it on backup power for now, and they fear a meltdown and (another) regional radiation disaster.
The threat of events like Chernobyl and Fukushima should not be taken lightly: it's not "paranoia" to want to prevent the emergence of moral hazards associated with risks of this magnitude.
Deregulation needs to be accompanied by a removal of the "no fault" insurance scheme that caps and collectivizes operator liability for nuclear power accidents (i.e. repeal the Price-Anderson Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act ). A repeal of corporate limited liability privileges would also be in order; shareholders need to know that their houses are at stake if their company makes our houses uninhabitable due to radioactive fallout.
One Chernobyl level disaster every single year would kill fewer people (pick your preferred estimate of deaths from Chernobyl, doesn't matter, still better by multiple OOM) than are killed every year by particulate emissions from fossil fuels. Making nuclear expensive and difficult to big is very close to the largest civilizational blunder humanity has ever made.
It's hard to overstate how much worse the world is because of this one choice. The worst case scenarios of nuclear safety and disasters would be _dramatically_ better for human civilization than what we got.
I am not arguing for exempting emitters of particulates from liability for the harms they cause. I am arguing that individuals ought to have exclusive control over the use and disposition (i.e. ownership) of themselves and their peacefully-acquired possessions, and one of the essential tasks of the legal system is to impose tort liability on anyone who violates such ownership rights. There is no difference in principle between imposing tort liability on emissions of radioactive particles versus imposing them on emissions from fossil fuel combustion. While air pollution is indeed very harmful (I grew up in an area where the smog and the sulfur dioxide fumes from a nearby steel plant were really bad, much worse than any air quality you will ever encounter in America today), so too is radioactive fallout that renders your real estate uninhabitable and natural resources unusable.
It must also be pointed out that in fact it _is_ possible to overstate how much worse the world is by us choosing to tolerate some harmful emissions. What a tort liability system accomplishes, in sharp contrast to arbitrary regulatory dictates or outright statutory mandates or prohibitions, is to compel emitters to internalize the costs of whatever harms they cause and likewise compel their victims to internalize whatever costs they incur in seeking compensation and damages for the harms done to them. Internalizing such cost/benefit calculations is essential for living in a society that respects each person's moral and intellectual autonomy, and where interactions are governed by the principle that they be voluntary, so that each instance of association, exchange, etc. is viewed prospectively as a win-win proposition by those involved.
Worse than any form of pollution is a government that curtails your liberty by its arbitrary say-so, often acting on behalf of special interests who profit from restricting their competition and on behalf of ideological zealots whose conception of how the world ought to be has absolutely nothing to do with you exercising control over your own life and optimizing your own personal pursuit of happiness. When governments fail to respect and secure individual rights, they don't simply make the world worse; they make life itself under their despotic rule intolerable.
Seabrook (NH) doesn't appear to be in the chart. Google estimates that it cost $5000 per kilowatt, but that's 1990 dollars. Converting to 2010 dollars... whoa, it's way up there. "We're gonna need a bigger chart."
What Charlie Sanders said. The nuclear industry is the reverse Boy Who Cried Wolf: it has spent decades assuring everyone that it was clean and safe, only to demonstrate just how bad the catastrophe can be. Now, the industry's safety claims have zero credibility.
This is an advertising problem. The political left absolutely wants only wind mills and solar panels around the world. The wind mill and solar manufacturers have successfully co-opted the political left. How come nuclear operators did not even try to do the same to the right? Propaganda/advertising works, but only if you actually participate. Perhaps engineers are simply above the idea that they have to be effective communicators?
I don't think so. I think nuclear harms are much more attention grabbing than the harms from other types of energy in the same way that shark attacks make better news stories than yearly flu deaths.
Part of the advertisement for nuclear is the factual lack of harm, compared with harm from other forms of energy.
Nuclear power has tail risks that dwarf other energy sources' by many orders of magnitude. People assume the prevalence of those tail risks are higher than they actually are, but the risks are there nonetheless and they have been vividly embedded into the public imagination by Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. Proper maintenance and operation of a nuclear power plant is going to follow a distribution, and it's a mathematical fact that someone's going to get stuck with the worst-run, most accident-prone reactor. The only surefire way to avoid a nuclear meltdown in your backyard is to impose unfeasible safety standards.
From a political standpoint, it's always going to be a losing battle to convince average people that their e.g. 1% estimate of catastrophe should actually be 0.001%. The Nuclear fission industry lost the battle to convince humanity that its tail risks could be ignored when it had multiple public catastrophes, including ones as recently as 2011.
None of these were even catastrophes, though. Chernobyl was reasonably bad but still vastly better than the amount of coal it replaced, IIRC, and nobody is ever going to build anything within orders of magnitude as bad as Chernobyl ever again anywhere, let alone in the United States. Your “mathematical fact” is a rhetorical trick since it ignores the fact that the distribution from which the tail risks are drawn can and has shifted enormously over time.
None of them ended up fulfilling the true tail-risk scenario, true. That being said, consider what could have happened: Chernobyl was a day or two of heroics away from making entire countries uninhabitable, and Fukushima nearly led to the permanent abandonment of Tokyo less than 15 years ago.
Coal doesn’t do that.
In Fukushima, there was no need for any evacuation. The only immediate casualties, 50 dead, old or sick people, died of evacuation, not from any radiation.
Life is flourishing in Chernobyl, not that it ever stopped flourishing. It is perhaps not so well-known that units 1 and 2 continued to function and thousands of men continued to work there.
Really, “nearly” led to the permanent abandonment of Tokyo? Entire countries uninhabitable? Those are both four orders of magnitude worse than anything I’m aware was seriously in the cards. On an inside view I’m not unusually well-informed about these things, so do feel free to give me some sources backing those claims up, though on an outside view I’m pretty confident they can’t possibly be true. (The permanent abandonment of Tokyo would be by far the worst economic disaster in the history of modernity, damages of what, tens of trillions? More? It seems pretty hard to imagine that I would never have heard anyone but you mention it in the context of Fukushima if it were really a live possibility.)
I’ve looked into it and it looks like the truth is “led some serious people to begin to think about what it would be like to temporarily evacuate Tokyo”, which is pretty wildly different from what you said—“nearly” seems tendentious and “permanently” just a falsehood you should have been well aware of. I admit that, though you seem to be dishonestly propagandizing, the reality is scarier than I would have thought.
“Scientifically illiterate,” a characterization that has been accurate for a long time, and appears destined to remain so.
Pretty weird to be writing a whole article about public views on nuclear using only data from 15 years ago and earlier.
When the nuclear establishment talks of nothing other than safety, and how safety is their first and last priority, and how busy and earnest they are in cleaning up old, unsafe, radioactive sites, the public naturally thinks that nuclear is actually very unsafe.
If you could take the survey back in time to 17th century Salem, Massachusetts, and change the topic to "witches," you'd get the same results. For analogous reasons.
A better title for the post might have been, "What Americans Think They Know About Nuclear Power."
Nobody has tested flying a Boeing 747 airplane into a nuclear power plant to see how many states it irradiates. Nuclear disaster is a fat tail event like those that Nassim Taleb has been telling us to incorporate into our planning. The way to be antifragile is to invest in distributed, secure technologies like solar and watch The Other Guy destroy himself with nuclear. The problem is, with nuclear, The Other Guy destroys us too because we're all living under the same canopy. And today the news is that Ukraine (site of a major Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the 1980s) has lost power to its nuclear power plant. Putin controls power to the nuke plant, so they're running it on backup power for now, and they fear a meltdown and (another) regional radiation disaster.
The threat of events like Chernobyl and Fukushima should not be taken lightly: it's not "paranoia" to want to prevent the emergence of moral hazards associated with risks of this magnitude.
Deregulation needs to be accompanied by a removal of the "no fault" insurance scheme that caps and collectivizes operator liability for nuclear power accidents (i.e. repeal the Price-Anderson Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act ). A repeal of corporate limited liability privileges would also be in order; shareholders need to know that their houses are at stake if their company makes our houses uninhabitable due to radioactive fallout.
One Chernobyl level disaster every single year would kill fewer people (pick your preferred estimate of deaths from Chernobyl, doesn't matter, still better by multiple OOM) than are killed every year by particulate emissions from fossil fuels. Making nuclear expensive and difficult to big is very close to the largest civilizational blunder humanity has ever made.
It's hard to overstate how much worse the world is because of this one choice. The worst case scenarios of nuclear safety and disasters would be _dramatically_ better for human civilization than what we got.
I am not arguing for exempting emitters of particulates from liability for the harms they cause. I am arguing that individuals ought to have exclusive control over the use and disposition (i.e. ownership) of themselves and their peacefully-acquired possessions, and one of the essential tasks of the legal system is to impose tort liability on anyone who violates such ownership rights. There is no difference in principle between imposing tort liability on emissions of radioactive particles versus imposing them on emissions from fossil fuel combustion. While air pollution is indeed very harmful (I grew up in an area where the smog and the sulfur dioxide fumes from a nearby steel plant were really bad, much worse than any air quality you will ever encounter in America today), so too is radioactive fallout that renders your real estate uninhabitable and natural resources unusable.
It must also be pointed out that in fact it _is_ possible to overstate how much worse the world is by us choosing to tolerate some harmful emissions. What a tort liability system accomplishes, in sharp contrast to arbitrary regulatory dictates or outright statutory mandates or prohibitions, is to compel emitters to internalize the costs of whatever harms they cause and likewise compel their victims to internalize whatever costs they incur in seeking compensation and damages for the harms done to them. Internalizing such cost/benefit calculations is essential for living in a society that respects each person's moral and intellectual autonomy, and where interactions are governed by the principle that they be voluntary, so that each instance of association, exchange, etc. is viewed prospectively as a win-win proposition by those involved.
Worse than any form of pollution is a government that curtails your liberty by its arbitrary say-so, often acting on behalf of special interests who profit from restricting their competition and on behalf of ideological zealots whose conception of how the world ought to be has absolutely nothing to do with you exercising control over your own life and optimizing your own personal pursuit of happiness. When governments fail to respect and secure individual rights, they don't simply make the world worse; they make life itself under their despotic rule intolerable.
Seabrook (NH) doesn't appear to be in the chart. Google estimates that it cost $5000 per kilowatt, but that's 1990 dollars. Converting to 2010 dollars... whoa, it's way up there. "We're gonna need a bigger chart."
I’d be interested in hearing any solutions you’d propose for how to solve or sidestep this perception problem.
What Charlie Sanders said. The nuclear industry is the reverse Boy Who Cried Wolf: it has spent decades assuring everyone that it was clean and safe, only to demonstrate just how bad the catastrophe can be. Now, the industry's safety claims have zero credibility.
…Huh? I actually have no idea what you’re referring to as “how bad the catastrophe can be.” If you mean Fukushima, like…that was in fact not very bad.
The only person harmed by the Three Mile Island "catastrophe" was an academic who had a heart attack discussing it.