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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33036 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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As someone who's pro-nuclear, the best argument I've heard against it is that we have lost the expertise at the state level to build these, and we can't trust corporations to handle something with such a significant downside risk.

Second, what's up with nuclear waste? Specifically, if the waste is really a nothing burger, as I see argued often, why do I see (other) experts talking about how to communicate how bad it is to people ~10k years in the future. What are those other experts thinking and why are they wrong?

My understanding is that yes it's gonna be radioactive for a while, but if you stick it in the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere, it's not going to spread very far. And we have a loooot of space, at least in the U.S.

As someone who's pro-nuclear, the best argument I've heard against it is that we have lost the expertise at the state level to build these, and we can't trust corporations to handle something with such a significant downside risk.

...

Did Oak Ridge National Lab build production plants before? Generally I am certain most people doing the construction were privately owned.

Most Western PWRs were built by General Electric and Westinghouse, and while the meme is hilarious, several of the machining and construction constraints for nuclear plants are rather specialized engineering, including to Westinghouse's recent troubles.

I don't think that's an unsolvable problem -- demonstrably, it wasn't before, and modern metallurgy has progressed tremendously -- but there's some annoying logistics and processes problems.

and we can't trust corporations to handle something with such a significant downside risk.

If we let corporations could build nuclear plants, but make it mandatory for all the executives to live next to the plant, you may be able to get them to build it with significant safety features in place.

My understanding is that people who work in nuclear plants are a lot less worried about them than the general populace. And to a lesser extent, most people who live near them as they are now aren't that worried, either.

I like this plan. Hell make all the important employees live next to it.

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