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A nuclear plant’s closure was hailed as a green win. Then emissions went up
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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Environmentalists wanted it gone because it was old, ill maintained, harmed wildlife by raising river temperature, and had leaks...
A leaky nuclear reactor upstream from a major metro area isn't a good thing...
The reason it was closed wasn't carbon emissions, that would be ridiculous.
It was closed because it was unsafe
While it was a net benefit to close this specific plant, fossil fuel power plants pump radioactive particles into the environment along with other pollutants.
Sounds less like it needed to be closed than that it needed to be repaired. It wasn't a problem because it was a nuclear plant, that was actually good and we need more nuclear plants. It was a problem because it was poorly maintained.
It was also a problem because it was a nearly 70 year old power plant design that would likely cost less to replace with a modern design from scratch than to try and repair the existing facility.
But anti-nuclear sentiment is strong enough that people don't understand how much they have improved since the 1950s so they assume a new plant will be as bad for the environment as this one.
Or maybe it's because nuclear power is ridiculously expensive and new designs are still a black hole in the budget. Wind and solar exist, right now, and are also carbon free, while being cheaper and not leaving the next 100 generations with radioactive waste. For which, by the way, we have but one final storage solution. Or is the facility in Finnland even up and running yet?
Oh good info. I am Pro Nuclear and Pro renewable. I think modern reactors have a real place in our future grid, but yeah old leaky reactors we should get rid of.
I trust nuclear can be built safely, problem is I don't trust the humans building, maintaining, and running it to not cut corners. I flat out didn't trust nuclear that's run for profit as shareholders will demand cost cutting to maximize profits, and I didn't know if I'd trust publication funded nuclear to stay properly funded.
It doesn't have to be capitalistic.
Having our energy grid be for profit is a ridiculous idea anyways.
And the Navy has been training nuclear engineers for decades, without any major accidents despite almost all of their reactors being shoved into ships and submarines and training takes 18-24 months and being offered to kids literally right out of highschool.
Nationalize the energy grid and require government certification/contracts fornuclear plant operators.
Hell, most Navy nuclear engineers would literally jump ship to that just to be off a ship. But loads more would sign if the pay/bonuses was in anyway comparable to what Navy gets.
Just because capitalism makes something impossible doesn't mean it's impossible. Just that it's incompatible with capitalism.
I'm aware, but, if we push for nuclear in the US right now, it will be for profit, and that's why I'm apprehensive. If we can keep it public and ensure proper funding, then I'm for it.
But you have to compare its safety with what will replace it. Gas is known to produce fumes that poison the air we breathe and warm the climate. This will lead to people dying.
So which is worse? I suspect the answer is gas because we consistently underestimate the danger from fossil fuels and overestimate the danger from nuclear. But you’d have to do some kind of risk assessment to be certain.
Specifically this plant?
I'm hoping by "gas" you mean natural gas and not gasoline, but yeah, natural gas is better than an untrustworthy reactor because of the risk involved. Not forever, but right now it's better than if we kept running a plant that will eventually have catastrophic failure.
Once turbines are spun up, it all pretty much runs itself. If you automated the oil purifiers it could conceivably run for years even decades on its on it's own and not have any issues.
But we don't take that chance, because something might go wrong.
The quality of this plant was shit, so the potential risk outweighed the known benefits and it needed shut down.
That doesn't mean nuclear power is bad.
It means this one specific plant is bad after 60 years of operation and being one of the first plants constructed. It doesn't mean we can't build a modern plant that's built to last and maintain it.
Shutting it down even if that means a temp return to fossil fuels for this one relatively tiny area for a few years is worth avoiding a nuclear meltdown a couple miles upstream of NYC...
It's basic risk assessment
According to you. I believe the opposite.
We need to measure the actual dangers (in terms of lives lost, illnesses, etc.) and risks (in terms of probability of various outcomes) involved in order to arrive at an informed conclusion regarding this issue.
Natural gas kills people every day. This plant might, hypothetically, kill people in the future. Barring strong evidence that the second outcome is dramatically larger or more likely, the default should be to avoid killing people now.
Welp...
The US government spent well over six figures teaching me nuclear engineering...
Seriously, it's fucking expensive.
So if you think this comes down to a matter of opinion. That's fine.
Feel free to keep thinking you're the expert. It legitimately doesn't matter in the slightest, I was just trying to help you understand.
Well I’m afraid you’re doing a very poor job of it. If you are truly an expert on this topic it should be easy for you to provide some research that supports your position here. If there is any. Or you can just assert you’re a brilliant expert who should be unquestioningly believed on the basis of a comment on Lemmy. We’ll have to see which is the more effective educational technique.
It does matter, unqualified opinions holding equal weight with expert opinions/analysis is a serious issue in society.
First we have no way of confirming that this person is really an expert and considering they have shown no real advanced knowledge of the topic, count me skeptical.
Second, this completely misunderstands the nature of science and expertise. Science works because it is a process that uses documentation of evidence to arrive at logical and probabilistic conclusions. Experts are not magical unicorns that spray forth truth. They are experts because they have a deep familiarity with the research in their field. Their roles is to share this research, not boldly state opinions and then fall back on their authority when challenged. That is the rhetoric of demagogues.
In fact, I think it is precisely this misunderstanding about the nature of expertise that has led to the problem you’ve described but misunderstood.
He absolutely isn't an expert. He may very well have done what he claims, but if so the military training he received simply teaches him to diligently read from a book and follow the steps listed there. He's no more an expert based on this training than someone is an artisan baker for following the recipe on the back of a box or Betty Crocker.
On a large scale, sure.
But I'm only going to sink so much time into explaining stuff for one person.
On Reddit it was different because 10s even 100s of thousands of people might read a chain of comments.
Smaller communities tho, if someone doesn't get, whatever.
how was it leaking radioactive material into the water? It's a PWR plant, that's not coming from the reactor itself.
Oh, seems like the spent fuel pool was leaking. Cool, not even the plant itself, literally just the waste storage. Fascinating.
With that logic they should be ripping out every hydroelectric dam as well.
If ones cracked and keeps springing leaks, yeah, that shit needs fixed.
But you don't exactly "rip out" a dam...
I think you're just one of many people who think one bad nuke pant makes them all bad.
One flawed anything doesn't make all of anything bad, especially when the bad one is one of the first made in the world and there have been ridiculous amounts of advancement in the field.
Hell, it was 20 years after we really figured out nuclear physics when this was built, and 3x that long till it was decommissioned. It just wasn't good anymore.
You all treat energy policy like it was highschool sports rivals.