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)
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Radiation from natural sources (like radioactive bananas you eat, or from soil or space) are always present.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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wind? geothermal? - actually pretty good. but limited to certain geographies. if you can make them, they are often the best options.
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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.
Are there not better means of renewable energy generation
Well, if you’re going to claim that, I’ll have you know that in our infinite wisdom to create an energy market, energy needs to be cheap to produce as well.
No current nuclear power plant where I live (cost seems to be rather location dependant) is creating cheap energy, they’re always more expensive than renewables. That’s why the investments in them has increased so much over the last few years while nuclear is just trudging along in the race to replace fossil fuels.
that by itself was not a claim, i knew there would be comparisons with other forms of renewable energy, so i wrote why some of them may or may not work, so it is meant to be read like
“Are there not better means of renewable energy generation like solar?”
“Are there not better means of renewable energy generation like wind?”
where I live (cost seems to be rather location dependant) is creating cheap energy
mostly becuse in most places, nuclear does not recieve subsidies. most other forms of energy (renewable or not) are subsidised a lot. And most politician would not want to add subsidies because it hurts their popularity. it is always taboo to do anything nuclear. there are reasons why nmri became mri, nuclear fusion research project just goes by fusion research.
I’m pretty sure it’s not subsidies, but safety standards. I’m not trying to pretend to understand Lazards “levelized cost of electricity”, and their graphs are seem to be off by 20 or I don’t read them correctly, but they are at least very clear that subsidies are taken out when they make their comparison. Nuclear is still the most expensive no matter how you slice it (except rooftop residential solar, but I think that gets around paying energy providers or something). Anyway, I’m more willing to trust them than the world nuclear association on if nuclear is price competitive.
I’ll grant you a better argument for next time: Nuclear is incredibly safe compared to other energy sources, but is uniquely held to a way higher safety standard than anything else. And reducing the cost of nuclear by reducing safety standards actually is unpopular, so politicians don’t do it and the cost keeps rising.
I’d still disagree on loosening safety restrictions, but at least that would be true, instead of blaming subsidies.
And reducing the cost of nuclear by reducing safety standards actually is unpopular
i have said the same in other comment, but we are not suggesting raise the limits, but make it to public that tiny amounts of radiation is not bad. so someone who protests building a nuclear power plant because they get an additional 1mSv of radiation (safe limitt currently is aroun 5mSv), it does not mean their risk of getting cancer has increased by 20% or something.
in case there is a small nuclear spill away, there is no need to a town/state wide lockdown, which completey brings all economic activity of that state to halt. plus the paranoia, and additional cost to handle increased medical vists. i am not trying to normalise spillaways, just that if it is contained, then there is no need to be paranoid.
Sorry, that part was not meant to imply you specifically want to reduce safety standards, just that if you want to have it be competitive on the energy market, you would have to do something about that, or subsidise it by an absurd amount.
But the point still stands, nuclear energy is expensive, and it’s not because of subsidies to other energy sources. Please don’t claim so next time.
1: every professional knows LNT is wrong, but there isn’t an agreed alternative.
2: there are safe limits set for people who work with radiation, so the LNT model isn’t actually used there at all.
This is a brilliant documentary from 2006, made by the BBC, on the topic of our fear of radiation, at the end it explains the LNT model and talks about the issues with it.
Please enjoy:
Thanks! My husband and I I watched this while we were in the UK for our wedding that year.
We opened up this Kyle Hill a few days ago to watch it since he’s in our regular rotation and stopped it in the intro, looked at one another and said “Oh shit! The J-curve thing!”
I love how Kyle covers this too. He’s great.
