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On nuclear power and risk
Mar. 19th, 2011 02:28 pmI am ambivalent on nuclear power. In theory, I think it could be a good thing if properly handled. I don't have a knee-jerk anti-nuclear reflex, and quite willing to acknowledge that all energy solutions have their failings, whether they involve pollution or scale.
And I'm not impressed by the quality of a lot of the nuclear debate. A lot of people are willing to decry nuclear power simply because the worst-case scenario is very very bad, without attempting to look at the whole of the risk/benefit tradeoff: nuclear has a risk of killing a lot of people and rendering countryside uninhabitable in a spectacular fashion, whereas coal kills a small number of people every day in an unexciting sort of way that doesn't sell newspapers. (And via climate change, has the potential to kill a large number of people in an indirect, deniable sort of way.)
So in theory, my view is that if nuclear works out better than coal when all possible scenarios are taken into account (weighted by their probability), we should replace coal with nuclear. That's the theory.
The problem is... well, let's look at that disaster that happened in 1986.
( No, not Chernobyl, the other one. )
And I'm not impressed by the quality of a lot of the nuclear debate. A lot of people are willing to decry nuclear power simply because the worst-case scenario is very very bad, without attempting to look at the whole of the risk/benefit tradeoff: nuclear has a risk of killing a lot of people and rendering countryside uninhabitable in a spectacular fashion, whereas coal kills a small number of people every day in an unexciting sort of way that doesn't sell newspapers. (And via climate change, has the potential to kill a large number of people in an indirect, deniable sort of way.)
So in theory, my view is that if nuclear works out better than coal when all possible scenarios are taken into account (weighted by their probability), we should replace coal with nuclear. That's the theory.
The problem is... well, let's look at that disaster that happened in 1986.
( No, not Chernobyl, the other one. )
