What is your definition of contaminate? If Devanney is correct that low doses of radiation are acceptable—and I believe he is—then much land which is described as ‘contaminated’ is in fact perfectly liveable. (Also see the people who illegally live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone). For a reasonable definition of ’contaminate’ then, it follows that a nuclear accident contaminates much smaller areas of land and is less expensive.
Your anti-nuclear argument also ignores the status quo of non nuclear energy. In America alone, fossil fuels (read coal) kill tens of thousands every year. So if you replaced all coal power with nuclear and had a Chernobyl every year (unrealistic extreme scenario), it would still save lives on net.
That said, I can see the argument that renewables are safer than both today, but OP is absolutely right to analyse the decades-long failure to replace coal with nuclear in the period before we had renewables.
Other competing sources of energy, the worst case scenario is acceptable.
I read this was a nod to the status quo bias of nuclear regulators. Millions(?) Of quality-adjusted life-years lost per year from fossil fuels are basically ignored in the cost benefit analysis.
What is your definition of contaminate? If Devanney is correct that low doses of radiation are acceptable—and I believe he is—then much land which is described as ‘contaminated’ is in fact perfectly liveable. (Also see the people who illegally live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone). For a reasonable definition of ’contaminate’ then, it follows that a nuclear accident contaminates much smaller areas of land and is less expensive.
One issue is that it is not possible to rigorously prove it’s livable because the parameter you are trying to measure—extra cancers and subtle damage—won’t show up for 20-30 years. Over such a long timescan it is difficult to even tease out causation. Your data will be incomplete, your subjects won’t all have lived long enough for any radiation damage to matter, some of them smoke, etc. But for the sake of argument I will let the conclusions be conclusive that radiation is harmless below a threshold.
I agree with you that the NRC’s decision making is not rational in that it is not factoring in the consequences of a decision to the host society. It’s factoring in the consequences of the decision to the NRC. This is true for most regulatory agencies, at best they are captured by not wanting to do something that endangers their own reputation.
Anyways even if all of the above is true the innovation cost I mentioned above isn’t there. Nuclear is also small market size in that many advancements do not make economic sense because few reactors are being built, and this would remain true if more were being built up to a point.
Solar and batteries are enormous market scales, and thus many improvements make economic sense.
One issue is that it is not possible to rigorously prove it’s livable because the parameter you are trying to measure—extra cancers and subtle damage—won’t show up for 20-30 years.
We could measure the effects that radiation has on rats in the lab to get a better model of how the dose of radiation relates to the frequency of effects.
To the extend that your model predicts that radiation causes DNA damage, DNA sequencing could also uncover that damage.
What is your definition of contaminate? If Devanney is correct that low doses of radiation are acceptable—and I believe he is—then much land which is described as ‘contaminated’ is in fact perfectly liveable. (Also see the people who illegally live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone). For a reasonable definition of ’contaminate’ then, it follows that a nuclear accident contaminates much smaller areas of land and is less expensive.
Your anti-nuclear argument also ignores the status quo of non nuclear energy. In America alone, fossil fuels (read coal) kill tens of thousands every year. So if you replaced all coal power with nuclear and had a Chernobyl every year (unrealistic extreme scenario), it would still save lives on net.
That said, I can see the argument that renewables are safer than both today, but OP is absolutely right to analyse the decades-long failure to replace coal with nuclear in the period before we had renewables.
I read this was a nod to the status quo bias of nuclear regulators. Millions(?) Of quality-adjusted life-years lost per year from fossil fuels are basically ignored in the cost benefit analysis.
What is your definition of contaminate? If Devanney is correct that low doses of radiation are acceptable—and I believe he is—then much land which is described as ‘contaminated’ is in fact perfectly liveable. (Also see the people who illegally live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone). For a reasonable definition of ’contaminate’ then, it follows that a nuclear accident contaminates much smaller areas of land and is less expensive.
One issue is that it is not possible to rigorously prove it’s livable because the parameter you are trying to measure—extra cancers and subtle damage—won’t show up for 20-30 years. Over such a long timescan it is difficult to even tease out causation. Your data will be incomplete, your subjects won’t all have lived long enough for any radiation damage to matter, some of them smoke, etc. But for the sake of argument I will let the conclusions be conclusive that radiation is harmless below a threshold.
I agree with you that the NRC’s decision making is not rational in that it is not factoring in the consequences of a decision to the host society. It’s factoring in the consequences of the decision to the NRC. This is true for most regulatory agencies, at best they are captured by not wanting to do something that endangers their own reputation.
Anyways even if all of the above is true the innovation cost I mentioned above isn’t there. Nuclear is also small market size in that many advancements do not make economic sense because few reactors are being built, and this would remain true if more were being built up to a point.
Solar and batteries are enormous market scales, and thus many improvements make economic sense.
We could measure the effects that radiation has on rats in the lab to get a better model of how the dose of radiation relates to the frequency of effects.
To the extend that your model predicts that radiation causes DNA damage, DNA sequencing could also uncover that damage.