I think the general aversion to nuclear is explained in part by our tendency to overestimate the risk of rare, catastrophic events and underestimate the risk of everyday events. This is precisely why we tend to fear flying more than driving, although the latter is far more dangerous. Ezra Klein has a nice summary of this phenomenon today, "How We Get Risk Wrong":<p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-we-get-risk-wrong/2011/05/03/AF6JF3fF_blog.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-we-g...</a>
I'd accept that nuclear can be safer, if I had any faith in the operational model for the plants.<p>I live in Albany, NY about 80 miles from the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, a Mark 1 GE reactor whose operator has a history of bad practices, like operating at 120% of capacity for extended periods and regularly releasing tritium into the Connecticut River. The facility has exceeded it's service life, and the operator is suing the State of Vermont for a license extension to make some more money on the place before having to clean up the site.<p>While coal plants in Ohio and Western NY probably pose a greater health hazard, there are other risks as well -- if a black swan event causes a serious incident at this aging facility, I live just outside of the "no humans allowed" zone. My family and relatives are in that radius and would be financially ruined by such an event.<p>I want a non-profit, quasi-military like organization operating plants in a transparent manner. I want aging reactors replaced by designs where operating safety was a bigger consideration in the design of the reactor. Operating these facilities with a bias towards making money for the operator is not in the public's interest.
By some estimates, nuclear would be among the safest energy sources (in deaths by TWh, one of the few honest ways of comparing the risks), even safer than wind and rooftop solar power.<p><a href="http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html" rel="nofollow">http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...</a>
Good TED talk by Gates explaining his vision for nuclear. Basically, fill up old missile silos with nuclear waste, and burn it from the top down. The waste is disposed of, heat energy is produced that can be harnessed, and there are no significant by-products (iirc). Very interesting, I'd never heard of that before, worth watching.<p><a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html</a>
Thorium, people !<p>Current nuclear reactors basically suck because they are the children of war ! They wanted to make a big scary bomb first. No surprise they chose the most dangerous element ! It's the same thing as why space flight is so expensive. Each communications satellite has to be the shape of a hydrogen bomb.<p>Thorium reactors are still in research phase. However, take a look at these quick bits from Wikipedia:<p><pre><code> - Rubbia states that a tonne of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal.
- just 8 tablespoons of thorium could provide the energy used by an American during his or her lifetime.
- there is no possibility of a meltdown
- it does not produce weapons-grade by-products, and will burn up existing high-level waste as well as nuclear weapon stockpiles
- Weapons-grade fissionable material (233U) is harder to retrieve safely and clandestinely from a thorium reactor
- Thorium produces 10 to 10,000 times less long-lived radioactive waste
- Thorium comes out of the ground as a 100% pure, usable isotope, which does not require enrichment, whereas natural uranium contains only 0.7% fissionable U-235
- Thorium cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction without priming, so fission stops by default.
- However, unlike uranium-based breeder reactors, thorium requires a start-up by neutrons from a uranium reactor. But experts note that "the second thorium reactor may activate a third thorium reactor
- Thorium is found in small amounts in most rocks and soils, where it is about four times more abundant than uranium, and is about as common as lead
- Thorium-containing minerals occur on all continents.
</code></pre>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fuel" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fu...</a>
If you think that nuclear power has a fair amount of tail risk (very small probabilities of catastrophic accidents) then any safety considerations based on historical data is meaningless.<p>In that case, most of the deaths & cost that occurred in the past would come from the single most sever accident (and this seems to be the case [1])<p>Moreover, the worse accident (Chernobyl) is not a good guide of how bad things can go: if the probability distribution of number of deaths per accident is fat tailed, then if an accident occurs that is worse than Chernobyl it will probably be much worse.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents</a>
The biggest issue with catastrophes like Fukushima aren't the deaths (which will be few), but the costs of the cleanup, which are enormous.<p>It's a valid concern, but we seem to fixate on the health dangers when coal kills many times more during normal operation and gets a free pass.
Nuclear power presupposes a competent and responsible society continuously from now until the distant future. Now look at Japan: no other society was better prepared for disaster, and still they came very close to a catastrophic nuclear disaster. Then look at all the other countries in the world w/ nuclear power, and project their histories forward 100 years. How many will experience a civil war? An external war? regulatory incompetence? etc. The chance of a catastrophic disaster somewhere, sometime, is 100%.
This seems a like a faulty argument to me. Those are not our only two choices. Sure coal is really really bad. But that does not mean that nuclear is our only alternative.<p>Currently solar power is getting much cheaper and more practical. Same thing with wind power. We also have a natural gas which recently has been getting cheaper as large new discoveries are being made.<p>Natural gas is still a fossil fuel but it is much much cleaner than coal both in terms of health pollutants and in terms of CO2. There are some issues with natural gas extraction, but even if the various environmentally damaging methods of mining the stuff get banned as they should, we still have plenty of natural gas from new discoveries to last us for the foreseeable future.<p>Thus, we can use natural gas while solar and wind catch up price wise, which will happen sooner than we think. Solar especially is improving faster than anyone thought. Then we can still use natural gas for occasions where solar and wind aren't working.<p>So the coal/nuclear argument is a false dichotomy. We can have neither. Of course we should run the current nuclear plants until the end of their lives, but there is no reason to build new ones unless some revolutionary technology that makes everything much safer emerges. I would say the only new nuclear plants we should build are ones that burn the waste of the old ones, because those would technically make things safer by removing waste.
Something that's often overlooked in these debates is that if we were willing to eat the proliferation risk and increased cost of high-enriched uranium we could reduce our production of long-lived alpha-emitters by an enormous amount.<p>This would make the storage of waste a lot more manageable.
Bill Gates here seems to be talking about the world in general, however, for the USA I don't see a high risk for nuclear energy.<p>The reactor can be installed in a relatively safe place and far from any habitants. This is different from Japan which has relatively a smaller and more dangerous land.
Why the heck do we care about Bill Gates' opinion on nuclear power?<p>It's about as relevant as any random person on the internet.<p>My solution is the people for nuclear power and those that build the plant, must live next to it.
there isn't much difference between coal and nuclear. A primitive civilization mines a substance that produces heat after performing a primitive operation upon it. It is like "gathering and hunting" state of civilization when compared to the "animal domestication and agriculture" state. It is time for human civilization to move on to renewable energy the same way like it moved to renewable food production 10K years ago.
Same problem as fossil fuels - nuclear is non-renewable.<p>We need a better long term solution:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun</a>
I think Mr Gates refuses to learn from history..<p>DO you know why originally Nuclear power was pushed as a safe energy source?<p>To make nuclear weapons, they needed a guaranteed supply of
raw fuel material. All nuclear plants with the exception of
some recent designs which get further away from this produce
nuclear material that is ideal to use in nuclear weapons.<p>It had very little due with any actual safety concerns.<p>It is one of the most extreme hazards forced on the world by the industrial-military complexes of all nations.<p>Lets stop calling it safe and call it what it is in reality..in fact a experimental way to generate energy
that is somewhat dangerous.
> Gates is putting his money where his mouth is. He is an investor in his friend Nathan Myrhvold’s nuclear reactor startup Terrapower,<p>Conflict of interests. Move on, people.