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Do you believe it's possible for two people to look at an outcome, then using different methods based on their own personal expertise, arrive at different positions on the outcome? If not, you can stop reading my posts and I'll stop reading yours. If yes, please continue reading.
Do you know what a risk assessment is? You know, where you establish the actual probabilistic risk of effects A, B, and C from causes D, E, and F. Have you, or has anyone else posting in this thread, applied a real risk assessment to an operational nuclear facility, versus, say, a coal power plant, or even the ten pesticides most commonly used within five miles of your home? Do you know the difference between toxic and radioactive? As in, plutonium is both toxic and radioactive, whereas strontium 84 is not toxic below a certain threshold, and strontium 90 is radioactive but not toxic below a certain threshold. I know you're familiar with the NIMBY effect. It manifests in this case by electricity consumers fighting against a repository for the waste generated by the electricity they consumed, to such an extent that the waste ends up illegally dumped in the ocean rather than contained in a controlled repository with a low, but non-zero, health risk. Most people don't do honest risk assessment because people conflate entire concepts like toxic and radioactive, and they tend to discount other concepts entirely, which makes for a shoddy assessment. It's probably a good thing most people don't do these risk assessments, because if they did there would be howls of protest against the coal plants that provide most of their electricity and the industrial farms that provide most of their food. Heads would explode.
People don't want nuclear plants, and that's fine, but that position is not based on actual risk. That position locks them into coal generation, which is currently the only other baseload generation that can be built anywhere. Hydro can be a baseload (until the reservoir silts in), but is geographically limited and suffers from a lack of potential sites and NIMBYism. It's either that, or much higher costs for "green" generation. There is another thread at the top of EE right now that highlights the cost of a PV system that could generate at a rate comparable to a nuclear power plant. I'll not repeat the analysis here. Wind has a similar cost issue. Both of these have a storage issue, because they have a ~30% capacity factor, which means it would cost even more to account for storage and excess generation to feed the storage while the sun is shining or the wind is blowing between 12 and 50 mph. Many of the people who irrationally fear nuclear generation also demand readily available, cheap power. That's currently coal, hydro in a few places, and gas at peaker plants. If they're willing to use a lot less electricity, on a less reliable system, and pay the same amount of money, maybe wind and solar.
As for "green," sure, upon completion solar and wind are fairly clean. Prior to completion, they require some damn dirty mining, refining, milling, transportation, and on-site installation. Doing all of that on the scale necessary to offset just the nuclear generation in this country would be messy, messier than most proponents believe. Maintenance on a vast fleet of mechanical generators like wind turbines also strikes me as a substantial long term problem, and buildout on such a scale would encounter massive NIMBYism to boot. But as long as people don't bother assessing relative risk and don't take responsibility for their actions (as energy hogs in some cases, hypocrites in others), I suppose they don't need to.
FWIW, my preference would be to 1) focus on lowering overall use rates from current levels so less generation is necessary; 2) build some nuclear plants to continue baseload as existing coal plants are taken offline; 3) establish at least two spent fuel repositories in NA to consolidate waste where it cannot be accessed or illegally dumped; 4) ban mountaintop removal mining; 5) place a progressive tax on electricity such that energy hogs are penalized into using less; and 6) encourage distributed PV to diminish baseload demand.
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