Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[Mardoc]

Nuclear energy has its own problems.
1) it's not renewable, as uranium mines are not infinite. So long term it doesn't solve everything.

In theory, yes.  We've got at least hundreds of years, though.  Even seawater extraction is viable, if the price of uranium ever went up.

Does anything else ever 'solve everything'?  Wouldn't it at least be nice to gain a thousand years before we have to pick between coal and solar power again?  Maybe a thousand years of technological progress will give us something better that we can't even imagine now, and meanwhile we delay the CO2 emergency.

2) you have to deal with the nuclear waste and burying it into the ground is actually a terrible way to do away with it.

Reprocessing is straightforward.  If you won't do that, nuclear waste is the only pollution that literally solves itself if you just wait and stay away.  Both are forbidden by non-proliferation and paranoia, so instead all the 'temporary holding facilities' have become de facto permanent. Even that works better than alternative power sources although they weren't designed for it; no one died from Fukushima but lots of people die from coal mining and wind tower maintenance and everything else.

3) when you take into account the cost of dismantling the plants it's not that cheap. The maintenance costs rise exponentially as plants get older. And we're not sure how some parts of the newest plants can be dismantled.

'Not that cheap' is the result of the paranoia that says nuclear standards are higher than standards of anything else, you will fight lawsuits to do anything with nuclear and fight lawsuits to stop.  Oh, and anyone who tries to figure out a better way will be vilified and probably quit.  I certainly thought about becoming a nuclear engineer, but I didn't want to deal with that.

I suspect dismantling a plant would be easy if instead of spending 10 years fighting lawsuits over the empty ground to build it, you spent 10 years letting the old plant sit empty. Or even better, if you used the site to build a new plant!

4) the safety of a nuclear power plant is never 100%. A terrorist attack on a plant could have devastating consequences.

...it's just that we've never actually seen anything go wrong in a way that was actually devastating.  It's not like there's a shortage of terrorists and devastating attacks on other things like nightclubs and skyscrapers, but no one wants to ban those.  Even Chernobyl was a lot less severe than everything else the Soviet Union did.

Anyway, the safety of anything is never 100%.  Every alternate method of power generation also has problems.  So does trying to live without power.

5) the new generation of power plants are awful. The EPR in Finland is 10 years late (and billions of euros over budget), the one in Normandy had to halt its construction for a while because the concrete around the future nuclear core wasn't strong enough, and is probably going to be a decade late too, and we just conned the UK into building one in Wales that is likely to kill EDF (our national electrical company) like the other two EPRs killed Areva which was in charge of them

Ok, so we could go back to 1960's technology if people are literally getting worse at this.  Although I would argue that the main reason we're getting worse is the constant opposition, making the engineers overdesign everything if they don't simply quit and go into another industry, preventing anyone from getting practice or skill, and making everyone expect that financial success is impossible so they don't try very hard.

[darrelljs]

Fusion. Followed by Future Tech.

Darrell

[AdrienIer]

Nuclear energy has its own problems.
1) it's not renewable, as uranium mines are not infinite. So long term it doesn't solve everything.

In theory, yes.  We've got at least hundreds of years, though.  Even seawater extraction is viable, if the price of uranium ever went up.

Does anything else ever 'solve everything'?  Wouldn't it at least be nice to gain a thousand years before we have to pick between coal and solar power again?  Maybe a thousand years of technological progress will give us something better that we can't even imagine now, and meanwhile we delay the CO2 emergency.

2) you have to deal with the nuclear waste and burying it into the ground is actually a terrible way to do away with it.

Reprocessing is straightforward.  If you won't do that, nuclear waste is the only pollution that literally solves itself if you just wait and stay away.  Both are forbidden by non-proliferation and paranoia, so instead all the 'temporary holding facilities' have become de facto permanent. Even that works better than alternative power sources although they weren't designed for it; no one died from Fukushima but lots of people die from coal mining and wind tower maintenance and everything else.

3) when you take into account the cost of dismantling the plants it's not that cheap. The maintenance costs rise exponentially as plants get older. And we're not sure how some parts of the newest plants can be dismantled.

'Not that cheap' is the result of the paranoia that says nuclear standards are higher than standards of anything else, you will fight lawsuits to do anything with nuclear and fight lawsuits to stop.  Oh, and anyone who tries to figure out a better way will be vilified and probably quit.  I certainly thought about becoming a nuclear engineer, but I didn't want to deal with that.

I suspect dismantling a plant would be easy if instead of spending 10 years fighting lawsuits over the empty ground to build it, you spent 10 years letting the old plant sit empty. Or even better, if you used the site to build a new plant!

4) the safety of a nuclear power plant is never 100%. A terrorist attack on a plant could have devastating consequences.

...it's just that we've never actually seen anything go wrong in a way that was actually devastating.  It's not like there's a shortage of terrorists and devastating attacks on other things like nightclubs and skyscrapers, but no one wants to ban those.  Even Chernobyl was a lot less severe than everything else the Soviet Union did.

Anyway, the safety of anything is never 100%.  Every alternate method of power generation also has problems.  So does trying to live without power.

5) the new generation of power plants are awful. The EPR in Finland is 10 years late (and billions of euros over budget), the one in Normandy had to halt its construction for a while because the concrete around the future nuclear core wasn't strong enough, and is probably going to be a decade late too, and we just conned the UK into building one in Wales that is likely to kill EDF (our national electrical company) like the other two EPRs killed Areva which was in charge of them

Ok, so we could go back to 1960's technology if people are literally getting worse at this.  Although I would argue that the main reason we're getting worse is the constant opposition, making the engineers overdesign everything if they don't simply quit and go into another industry, preventing anyone from getting practice or skill, and making everyone expect that financial success is impossible so they don't try very hard.

Ok 1) is more a debunking of the popular "nuclear energy means french energy independence" talking point. We're not independent if we're importing 100% of our uranium.
2) I've never heard anyone use another method than burying the waste. Maybe other things exist but until they become widespread they're not relevant. And "waiting it out" is not great when the half life of the waste is like a million years. I wouldn't bet on there being no problem for that amount of time.
3) if something goes wrong with wind power a big stick falls in an empty field. If something goes wrong with nuclear power half of France gets cancer. So it's pretty good that they have higher standards.
I haven't heard anyone call dismantling a plant easy.
4) the USSR sacrificed thousands of people to control Chernobyl. And it's still not over, they just finished a protective structure and are having to build more. And once again, a solar plant failure is a lot less problematic than a nuclear plant going crazy.
5) the oldest plant designs are not more efficient than solar/wind power unless you forgo every norm that the nuclear engineers have crafted since then.

During our presidential election there was a debate about our energy sources and about our oldest nuclear plants (that have gone way past their lifetime). The 3 choices are either reducing our nuclear power production through progressively closing our oldest plants, doing the maintenance our energy agency advised (costing so much that other power sources would be cheaper) or keeping our decrepit plants as they are (which by every account is bringing us into unknown territory). Then there was a choice between continuing with the EPRs or going into damage control (both costing a lot). None of those make me happy about fission energy

[Ichabod]

I certainly thought about becoming a nuclear engineer, but I didn't want to deal with that.

So you didn't want to deal with the fallout?

[Old Harry]

5 Is the biggest problem with nuclear fission for me - why do plants keep getting more expensive? While wind/solar/gas/coal gets cheaper as more cash gets invested nukes just cost more and more. Is it all pointless red tape and regulation, or do the engineers creating them keep spotting new problems that we've been lucky to avoid so far, or are they now including decommissioning costs in the price?

If I believed the price tag I'd probably be a fan because Fukoshima showed just how much damage a well maintained plant can take without melting down. But the hidden military subsidies (there were plants built to a less efficient standard to produce plutonium so who knows how much the defence dept paid for those), project cost overruns and decommissioning costs make me think renewables are way cheaper.

Even so I'd prefer nukes to the expansion of coal that certain well funded politicians are pushing.

[AdrienIer]

IIRC the cost increases are because the new cores are more efficient but need more complicated infrastructure to control them

[MJW (ya that one)]

I was right about UKIP crashing and burning (they lost all their seats they were defending).

Don't care about Trump withdrawing for reasons Mardoc outlined.

[Brian Shanahan]

Getting out of the Paris agreement ? Seriously USA ?

Most green treaties are First World countries shoving their polluting industries into China/India/Third World countries (intentionally or no), I'd be curious to see what, if any, effect this reversal will have.

I'm not so worried about the Paris accords themselves, but the more general message.

The Paris accords are essentially a promise to think about pretending to try to attempt to do something about Global Warming.

[rho21]

Interesting exit polls we have from the UK election (Conservatives still the largest party but without a majority). If they mirror the actual results, Theresa May will be resigning in the morning.

[MJW (ya that one)]

You are going to have to add 3 seats for SF and 10 seats for DUP to the CONs, which will get them over 50%, but this is still horrible.