WTF Happened to Nuclear Energy? 

Thank you for the very enlightening video.

You should reallly mention about coal when it is burned it releases heavy metal and radioactive materials as well iin the ash which is a major cause of death

I think Dolores Cannon said well, when Nuclear Energy invented it was for negative purpose (war) so it has bad negative Aura around it and this is resisting to become power source for good. (i know it's metaphysics but still it make sense at some level)

Nuclear energy is the most efficient and cleanest energy that we have to this day. Yes, the previous accidents are terrible, but I'm pretty sure that with recent technologies, these risks can be reduced to almost zero.

Another thing you could research on the subject is companies like Thor Energy, and the types of reactors like LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) and the people working on those ideas like Ron Sorenson.

I know nothing about this, but is rad waste all solid? why was i udner the impression that even the water that the rods are submersed in essentially radiocative forever and we also need to take care of disposing it as well?

@@jamesli926 heavy water is not radioactive. Let me do a better explanation. Neutron activation is the process that causes stable elements to become radioactive. This is caused by free neutrons interacting with nuclei. When water is hit by neutrons, there are two atoms that can go through neutron activation (obviously) hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen gets hit and forms deuterium which is stable, though the deuterium can then get hit by a neutron and become tritium which is mildly radioactive. This is a very small amount of water as most of the water is still going to be regular hydrogen. Now oxygen has two heavier versions than the most common, Oxygen-16, and those heavier versions are oxygen 17 and 18. Both of which are stable. The only radioactive isotope of oxygen (that doesn’t decay almost instantly) is oxygen 15 which is less than 16 and cannot be formed from neutron activation. Thus water in a nuclear plant is not really radioactive at all. Water is only good at moving things that are radioactive which it doesn’t in a nuclear power plant.

​@@jamesli926 I think there are trace amounts of material dissolved into the water (more if they melt), but fuel pellets have cladding specifically to prevent that (and corrosion). That gets filtered and the filters eventually end up as LSA rad waste (I think I followed a convoy for around 15 minutes on the highway, I noticed because it had a RAD III placard which is rare, and the LSA classification means that the high radioactivity comes from a lot of moderately radioactive waste (also it didn't list isotopes, so it was probably a mix). The neutrons do produce some tritium (much more in heavy water reactors like CANDU) but the typical policy for that is to ensure the water doesn't have significant organic material, dilute it, and release it into the water. Tritium is produced by cosmic rays and doesn't concentrate in the environment, so the release limits are surprisingly high. It just doesn't move the needle much. Also tritium has a 12 year half life, which is really annoying (too long for "decay in storage" to be the obvious choice, but short enough to have high specific activity and become less useful to work with over normal timescales). In an accident short lived isotopes like Iodine-131 can be released. Those are extremely dangerous because they have short half lives and correspondingly high activity. That's why you want to stay inside for weeks if a nuclear bomb goes off, and people are told to avoid dust, food, and drink which may be contaminated. In the case of Iodine you can take a large (actually somewhat toxic, so don't take it unless you think you're going to consume radioiodine in the near future) dose of regular iodine, the idea is to saturate your body so that the radioiodine gets excreted rather than retained in important organs (there are also some medical conditions which are treated with radioiodine because it targets specific organs, people tend to ignore biological half life and focus on the nuclear). The exclusion zones are mostly due to things like Sr-90 and Cs-137. They don't dilute nicely, have high specific activity, emit radiation which can penetrate skin, boil out of a reactor if it loses coolant, and have half lives of around 30 years. I think if you magically deleted those two isotopes the Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones would be tiny to non-existent. The long lived isotopes aren't very radioactive, so they're pretty much toxic waste. Also note that spent fuel will probably be reused (if you separate out the components it can go back in a reactor, and the other isotopes have uses) so geological repositories should probably consider the safety of workers recovering the spent fuel in a century or so. The main reasons we (OK, at least one country does) don't reprocess currently is that it's expensive; we can already meet demand with mining, non-fuel neutron targets, particle accelerators, et cetera; and a reprocessing plant is a make way to get plutonium for nuclear weapons (US reprocessing was done by military contractors, and secrecy protected them from accountability with the notable exception of Operation Desert Glow, where the DOE was raided by the FBI and EPA).

@Divisiblebyzero Radioactive Wasteland Thank You 😊

I used to say rad in the 90s, didn’t know I was referring to radiation 😂

Mainly Americans do this because they're so proudly ignorant.

People who think Little boy and Fat man are the same as nuclear power should lose their breathing license.

And the other way around. Most people that are pro nuclear only know that the energy source emits very little co2, without thinking about the long term in terms of waste, recycling and cost.

@@JonasSalen add in the fact that everyone works to their own level of incompetence

@@JonasSalen Waste? if its about safety they now bury them in deep isolation covered in concrete. It will literally outlast human civilization. Even then nuclear energy is the most efficient source of energy and the waste produced is little compared to other alternatives. Cost? it might be bit more costly to maintain but its way more practical for situations and if it was as heavily invested as renewables it can be better for cost. Recycling? Nuclear fuel's 90% can be recycled wdym? other can 10% is sent to the deep isolation no worries.

Lmao. They miss a lot of things. For example solar uses children mining in Africa who will definitely die and for Nuclear if something does happen a ton of people die over a long period of time. Nuclear is horrible and this idea that capitalism wont cause issues with maintenance you are fooling yourself. Nuclear meltdowns will happen and tons of land space will be lost

That's because people are uninformed idiots.

they left out two important factors in nuclear power that arte total game killers... the environmental damage it causes to mine Uranium ore (mostly in open mines like a lot of coal) and the limited supply of nuclear "fuel". You do not WANT to set everything on NPP only to have nothing to run them with in 100 years or less.

@@Ugly_German_Truths Uranium is incredibly abundant, mining for renewables is just as bad if not worse.

​​​​@@cupcakke1294 @Ugly_German_Truths And drilling and fracking for oil and natural gas not too mention coal is on a whole other level we just ignore. Isn't the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico still ongoing despite being the largest oil spill of all time in 2010?

It's not regulation, it's cost of capital. NPP are inherently large projects, and investors need a larger return to justify financing the enormously expensive (and lengthy) construction period. More broadly, nuclear isn't competitive because each 1 billion in investment goes (roughly) into producing 1 GW of power, whereas the same investment in renewables yields a factory which produces a continuous supply of individual units in perpetuity. If we invest the same amount in nuclear and renewables year after year, nuclear will grow linearly, and renewables exponentially. This is what we are currently seeing.

^Why couldn't both regulation and investment cost be true? Nuclear energy isn't the only solution, but it's still a key technology to combat climate change. Even areas that can currently use renewables still need a diversified grid to reduce vulnerability to natural disasters, or are limited by space or other factors. It's within everyone's interest to make it as safe and cheap as possible.

​@@bagfootbandit8745 Lookup Eash-Gates et al.'s 2020 article in Joule, it's easy to find. Safety regulation explains only about 1/3 of the construction cost increase, the rest is materials and labor productivity. All these factors contribute to larger construction costs, which are amplified by the cost of that capital. In other words, safety and labor add cost, but what makes those costs so punishing is the extra profit investors need from the energy to make those investments worth pursuing. You might be able to mitigate some of those costs by reducing safety standards (which is risky), but the real problem is construction time caused by lower labor productivity, which adds direct costs and increases the discount rate.

Yup. I'm all for nuclear yet it is expensive as hell, and the projects always go over the quoted amount by billions. It is all about cost per MW. Nuclear proponents talk about SMR and all these other technologies like they are already proven to be actually cheaper. Yet I see no evidence of this.

great to hear from a personal testimony

You actually get 59% of your energy from hydro and 15% from nuclear butt still better than most countries.

He's talking about Ontario, not Canada as a whole.

@@TheManbeastmike That's all of Canada, in Ontario it's 60% nuclear

@Connor McIntyre ahh I see I stand corrected

Can you share it with us?

And to think, you could have just waited a week and deep-faked your face onto his, then submitted this instead! But seriously though, wishing you success with your thesis. 😊

​@@BokoMoko65 +1

Hope you emphasized how stupid my countries (germany) nuclear policies are.

Hey, I wanna read your Bachelor Thesis! It sounds incredibly interesting! Lets connect!

💯

Hey there. I know that feeling about corporations but from different experiences. However, I can't really blame 100% the company on that case as it was a huge earthquake that led to a tsunami which by itself alone killed tens of thousands of people. Deaths related directly to the accident at the plant (caused by water damage from the tsunami) were just two operators as far as I remember. Nonetheless I recognize the company's fault in not building a higher coast wall as it had been recommended to them to do years before the tragedy. Mostly the damage resulting from the accident was local contamination and according to numbers taken on the aftermath, it's not that bad in the sense that it wouldn't kill you and is highly unlikely to cause sickness. I'm sorry about rambling here in the comments but it just pisses me off that this accident has been blown out of proportion, that the real cause of the tragedy is forgotten and therefore the deaths disrespected, and that it has been weaponized to attack the field as a whole with terrible results;just look at Germany. I hope we see eye to eye.

@@kevinkarlwurzelgaruti458 Germany is truly awful. They dispose of nuclear reactors to buy nuclear generated power from france and burn coal and gas. Eco-friendliness, i guess.

@@alexturnbackthearmy1907 Yeah, the Green party took a 12 gauge to Germany's foot when they shutdown the last plant.

Me, too. They mess up too many critical things, because their goal is too often to be voted into power, over and over.

Because it is invisable, it is hard to get a good understanding.

That's hilariously unexpected

Lol. Very funny. I'm okay with people being ignorant about uranium ore and radioactivity. I'm less okay with voters being uninformed and paranoid about nuclear energy.

Northern Sask?

people dont seem to understand the disconnect between ore and refined radioactive isotopes, when its in ore form its mixed with other ores that need to be displaced/removed to create the expected refined product that is actually used in reactors. the other one is that people dont understand that the components of radioactive materials are generally "safe" when handled correctly, its only when you force them together and a fissile reaction occurs is where a majority of the radioactivity comes from. follow the rules that have been created literally by people dying playing with this stuff and everything's fine. play god and think you know better and nature bitch slaps you back to the cave where you belong to die in a puddle of your own goo.

yes

i agree

yes, i also agree

*_After deliberating briefly, I realised that yes, i also agree_*

💯

Let's be clear on one thing: if the existing electric companies aren't going to profit from it, it's not going to happen. Profit can mean many different things to a trillion dollar industry that has brainwashed an entire country into voting against their own self-interests in a historically unequalled propaganda program that has lasted over a century. You can be certain that if they wanted this they would be making it happen and nobody could stand in their way.

Instead of trying to get people to understand nuclear as U235 being used as fuel, you should be telling people how great Thorium is, how abundant it is, and how it has the least amount of waste. The chances of a meltdown or contamination event such as Three Mile Island would be highly improbable.

Misrepresenting realities = anything nuclear. Nuclear foe example is legislatively not accountable.

I feel like a breakthrough in solar would surpass nuclear, unless we could do safe localized fusion. Fission requires materials, infrastructure, grids, specialized maintenance.

From a technical view I really love NPPs. It was when I started digging into that subject that alternatives seemed way more attractive. The main reason being cost and humans: For me all arguments in this video are subsumed under "cost": Insurance cost to cover for accidents and cost for recycling/enrichment/other types of reactors to manage/store waste. Those should be factored in the $/kWh stats, which they mostly aren't (insurance is capped at very low levels and the cost for disposal of the waste is outsourced so that the public must come up for it in the end). The "human"-argument wasn't even mentioned: You can have a quite nicely engineered plant, but humans just are too dumb/egoistic/aggressive to operate it safely. Almost every accident showed a big human-factor like safety measures not implemented due to greed and neglect. For the aggression part: I'm quite curious about what happens to the Zaporizhzhia NPP, and NPPs seem to easy getting a bomb (even if it "just" is a dirty one). That's why I tend towards renewables + a high cost for CO2-certificates, so that externalities for energy production are (mostly) covered. For NPPs it seemed like even the insurance part would make them economically unviable (maybe it gets better for small reactors, but then we still didn't solve the waste problem).

And also to this day there regions in Europe, for example southern Germany with higher background radiation because of Chernobyl. You still cannot eat mushrooms from this region because they accumulate the radiation.

So what's the Alternative? You don't see the way fossil fuel pollution slowly kills people every day but Smog is real. Water contamination is real. Yes you usually have to live in a big city to actually visibly see the effects of politics but it still affects everybody today in a VERY negative way.

@@jkjk946 and the air all around stuttgart literally kills people for many years already. fuck the mushrooms lol

That's why I disagree with Cleo's point about comparing deaths relative to fossil fuels. It's such a different beast. Coal plants have a predictable risk, you can look at the past decade, plot a line and reliably estimate the next. With nuclear, the fear is not about the points already on the graph, it's about the magnitude of the outlier that is not there, but can't ever be completely dismissed.

@@Gundamguy-py3ir Yep, humans have gotten used to putting up with the more dangerous and abundant byproducts of coal and fossil fuel consumption. The nuclear scare simply stems from ignorance on the topic. Fossil fuels are harming you just as much from thousands of miles away. The average person just doesn't realize it.

Yes! The main draw of nuclear, is that reliable amounts of power are generated... with wind and solar - it tends to de-stabilize the power grid - too much or too little is often produced - during cloudy days, other weather events and we simply do not have the battery technology yet to store the power, at scale.

@@drx1xym154 Plus energy storage becomes a problem.

Solar and wind are potentially dangerous for power grid without energy storage. If you don't have enough conventional or nuclear power plants to support it, there is short way to shutting down some areas and even for blackouts.

(I'm not sure but) I think the RU-vidrs name is Ordinal, he has a series on Nuclear all the pros and cons explained well he did an easy graphical representation of the renewable vs nuclear debate too, solar wind hydro pumped hydro (for storage) vs nuclear. Would be great for people who wanna do a deeper dive

Although you are correct about the land use, land is often not in short supply so it depends on the location. But you are wrong about the consistent output. Solar has a daily and seasonal cycle yes, but nuclear must be taken offline for maintenance from time to time. (I know full well as I live in South Africa where we get increased load shedding when the nuclear plant is on maintenance). Similarly our coal plants break down frequently. Every power plant has a capacity factor ie how much time it is actually running. Solar and wind on the other hand almost never have complete outages outside their daily /seasonal cycles. But I agree, to compare renewables to nuclear on cost you do need to know what balance of resources you are putting on the grid and whether or not you need storage/ over capacity etc. But to pretend that nuclear is never offline is just nonsense.

There are several important points that weren't covered - for example environmental impact of fuel recycling facilities (spoiler: they leek a lot of radiation)

I think we should also talk about where the batteries and materials for wind and solar come from and how its waste is handled. I am not sure they are as safe or environment friendly

Where are conclusive medical findings reported that anything nuclear has even possibly medical benefits. Necessarily including any medical 'quality of life' loss risks, near instant deaths due to radiation etc. Asked AMA but no answers. Read medical journals but no proven benefit concluded, only possibly following surgical removal and combined with other natural health therapies.

@@idnwiw Still much more clean than any alternatives capable of outputting that much power. Also, leek =/= leak. Uranium mines are so much less invasive compared to our current amount of coal mines and oil drilling. Are they still invasive? Yes, but it's unquestionably the better of two evils when it comes to how much land is ruined for our power generation.

All mining has a checkered past - coal, oil, lithium, gold, rare earth metals etc.

Editing that stuff takes soooo long.. It's good to go old school once in a while 😂😂

This is reassuring! I know that the security in Canada is also very high around NPPs.

depends on country

Even that vetting process is irrelevant. There are multiple layers of security between the outside and anything important. Even then, the only real mayhem anybody could do is deprive people of power by disabling the plant. Which isn't any different than disabling any kind of power plant. Nobody is carrying anything of significant danger away from a nuke plant. Dirty bombs are a fantasy; nothing is paradoxically both radiologically potent and stable enough to fashion into such a device. It takes weeks, if not months to shut down a reactor and let it cool enough to open up the core and remove fuel rods which, again, cannot really be used for anything nefarious. The same is true of spent fuel rods.

@@kizmiaz513 So what? Reactor containment buildings are bunkers, built strong enough to withstand anything short of literal bunker busting munitions. Then there are all the built-in safety measures inside the containment building. Another Chernobyl cannot happen anywhere because only the soviets were incompetent enough to design, build, and operate a reactor so poorly, and nobody has been dumb enough to do it again.

No one ever worries about bad actors igniting an oil rig and causing an eco disaster in the ocean. It's sad how much we misunderstand nuclear energy and the system in place for it.

I didn't know you were based in Austria-do you ever produce videos in German?

or cost

@@HTV-2_Hypersonic_Glide_Vehicle nuclear isn't expensive to operate

@@kentozapater8972 no, but to build over a long period of time, in a place like Texas it would look costly. However, I don't really care, as I would enjoy the benefits.

@@liabe18 Yes, we're here in Vienna. We do produce TV Docs in German but all our RU-vid videos are in English. (we did try some EN dubbing on YT though!)

Really? I was a Health Physics Technician in the Health Physics Department with Health Physicist as our manager at the Shippingport Atomic Power station in 1974. Maybe everything your dad told you is not true

Radioactive material which has a half life of a million years is actually the safest radioactive material. You're in more danger of cancer from ingesting potassium from a banana than you are if you ingested radioactive spent fuel with a million year half life.

@B Dog they're not meant to be permanent, but having 100 years to get a permanent solution is far better than having 40 years for it.

@@BDog317 Technically difference is you and everyone you could possibly know will already be dead.

It's funny that people have concerns about nuclear waste, which is clearly marked and buried, when there are literally pockets of radioactive material in the ground naturally that will kill you without you ever knowing the cause.

@B Dog what do you mean "can't find a solution because physics". The solutions exist. Deep geological repositories and fast reactors. Both exist already. The reason they haven't been implemented is because there isn't a need because waste just takes so little space.

As an electrical engineering graduate I disagree. eg: solar doesn't use a fuel that operates in a critical runaway state that you are constantly trying to cool and keep from exploding.

@@michaelmurray2833 the same power source that isn't viable for some significant periods of time (after sunset)? Energy storage is a difficult problem to solve and one we haven't. Last time I checked molten salt reactors were runaway safe. We aren't spending enough time/money/effort on nuclear energy research and development.

@@michaelmurray2833 As a mechanical engineering grad I can tell you that you need to google the numerous reactor types out there, specifically CANDUS, that don't use the highly enriched uranium you're thinking of. Natural uranium reactors boost their fuel up into criticality as it will not go critical on its own and is therefore substantially safer at a cost of some efficiency. Old, fundamentally flawed designs have lead to alot of otherwise intelligent people to be afraid of the nuclear boogeyman despite it being hands down the most effective & safe power source humanity has by every important metric. The toxic waste from used solar panels is something else you should google more, though not many people care about that since we ship much of it to Africa anyway...

@@michaelmurray2833 I highly doubt you are because if you were you would know that solar is a very unreliable source of energy and needs other plants in tandem to compensite for its wild fluctuations. Nuclear is more a lot more comperable fossil power plants but a lot cleaner, and in fact it releases much less radiation to the atmosphere than the burnt fossil fuels do.

"In the past all the incidents (besides Fukushima) have all been from human error." And that's why I'm no fan of nuclear power. All major accidents (including Fukushima in my opinion) and a fair few minor incidents, have been down to human error. Either related to the design or the operation. No matter how smart we design a nuclear power plant... No matter how many safety precautions we build into it... It's still designed, build, and operated by humans. And humans are flawed. In the immortal words of Terry Pratchett: “Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”

Actually no, electric car isn't carbon free. All the body plastics are made of carbon, the steel for chassis and springs and engines are made of steel which is made by burning iron in coal. Wheels are made of a special plastic that is extremely toxic when disposed (burn, put in wheel dumps yards, etc,etc) And if you think about itthe majority of energy nowadays comes from fossil fuels. So the electricity that powers your car is just fossil fuels that instead of burning in your car engine, is burning in some thermal energy plant somewhere else. (Energy is constant, you can create more energy efficient vehicle, but energy's fuel and it's waste must always exist). The same logic applies to solar and wind energy. Except the waste and fuel isn't on Earth. It's on the Sun (the Sun create wind too btw). With Hydrogen being fuel and Helium being waste. Basically it's just proxy nuclear energy. A good comparision is having a nuclear plant, but instead of harvesting energy directly from the nuclear reaction, we put a solar panel and wind turbine behind a layer of lead protection and almost vacuum. And that's why solar and wind turbine is so inefficient, it's a proxy harvesting of energy of an energy we can already produce with more efficient method of harvesting.

Yes! I was disappointed he didn't mention this. We use nuclear in !@#$% submarines! If "living next to a nuclear plant" was dangerous, all our submariners would be dead. We use nuclear ALL the time and rarely, rarely have accidents.

Fukushima IS a human incident The French Atomic Energy and Alternative Energy Commission sent warning to Fukushima attendant about the fact that the central was not tsunami proof and that simple adaptation could easily solve the issue. They just decide to brush it off.

Fukushima sparked fear but, to date, ONE person has died as a result.

They worked together at Vox. Johnny left first and I think he may have been the inspiration for Cleo to go out on her own too.

They have similar styles likely due to the fact that they both previously worked at Voxx.

Do you have a hard time articulating your thoughts?

They were 'co-workers'

​@@frostycometh5822lul wut?

If you’re genuinely curious, the source is cited, so you can read precisely how the numbers were calculated.

As a fellow nuclear engineer, hello!

10:50 but Chernobyl destroy soviet union economy. Is Made 30% debt of gdp. For cost for cleaning. You don't think that. In poor nation have Nuclear

How far off is fusion energy in your opinion?

@@Zero-oh8vm Always 20 years

thank dee'z nuts

Exactly. 50 gallon barrel of uranium can power a city for over 40 years. The only waste is 50 gallon barrel of depleted uranium, and steam. In a 40 year operation, the lunch room where the workers eat, would accumulate more waste than the actual nuclear reaction.

@@bradleysmith9431 precisely! I saw something one time that said you could store all the waste it would take to power everything you'd need or use your whole life, in a coffee can

​@@collinherold8047 still a coffee can per person. And there are a lot of people. Also calculate the rent of storing that coffee can in a safe designated facility for 100000 years and you realize that you aren't paying for the entire cost of that energy. Kind of like fossil oil but less immediate.

Are you considering to work on Fusion, Small Modular Reactors (still fission but very scalable and safely self-contained), or traditional fission reactor sites?

@@handlemoniumI hope so too lol

Go to Purdue University. They do tours of their Nuclear Reactor. One of the biggest privately owned ones. Its pretty cool

@@DougieFresh765 Reed College here in Oregon has a research reactor as well. NuScale is based here as well 😎

me to

Except that it is permanent. A plane crash kills today only. Cherynobl is still killing people... Kiwajalien is still killing people... White Sands is still killing people... Fukashima is still killing people... Tsar Bomba is still killing people... Three Mile Island is still killing people... The list goes on. Also, air travel is safe, until it isn't. Espousing stats obscures reality. When a plane hits a mountain, it is almost always fatal to all passengers and crew, just like a nuclear meltdown. Whereas a bus hits a car, and very, very few people die burning and screaming in anguish before they are liquified. It is entirely different.

Exactly! Don't be the For-profit MSM sheeple they depend on for survival! Turn off the Idiotbox and touch grass!

Not to mention the news stations are basically giant echo chambers which focuses and high lights the accidents a bit too much.

indeed,its like comparing a 1900's byplane to a Modern day passenger plane,one would crash much more freaquently than the other...

I was about to mention this until I saw your comment. This would probably be the most important thing to discuss if you want to convey confidence in nuclear energy.

This right here, the RBMK(soviet design from Chernobyl) is an extremely sketchy reactor where candu ( I work at one) is very safe in comparison.

Nuclear energy is a heavily regulated industry, and many public fear will force companies and corps to keep it safe as possible

I've got the same briefing from the experts, that were on the payroll of the nuclear power plant. All those plants were build with safety in mind and they were all constructed to be safe at the current situation. So they thought also about Fukushima, which we now know it wasn't prepared for the higly unlikely event that occured. The problem is not that it's unsafe, the problem is that it will never be 100% safe.

But they will cut corners as much as possible and with thorium , salt cool reactors , …….

@@JonasSalen remind me how many people died due to the nuclear accident at fukushima please. Oh and if you could remind me how many people die in coal mines each year that would be amazing.

@@crusader8102 Wiki says one died after the accident in 2018 from radiation. The tsunami (tidal wave)killed 15,500. Not that many people die in the mines in USA these recent years, but the black lung thing can get you later.

The comment I was looking for.

exactly, for being a 30 minutes video they really stretched their points a bit too much and didn't go in detail enough in my opinion

In addition that renewables are just not sustainable in many places. It’s not all or nothing, it’s a combination of many elements.

Or it instead of energy storage, it requires energy sources that can quickly kick in when there is no solar or wind. Which are not the "cleanest".

Yea, renewables are great, but they aren't yet sufficient enough to rely on for world-scale energy needs. And honestly, probably wont ever be, as fusion(which is arguably a 'renewable' in a sense) will likely take over at some point and keep renewables as more of a supplementary and localized energy source.

Yeah, I hadn't considered the cultural effect of the bombs until my dad pointed out why all of their cartoons have overpowered humanoids that can launch energy beams/balls capable of causing massive destruction.

Right? I feel like the journalism has more integrity when they interview actual experts instead of artificially propping up each other’s brands and egos by featuring each other 😂

You had no right to be this accurate

It doesn't help that Fukushima happeend in Japan, a country people assume was running things as up to code as one could. "If it happened to them why wouldn't it happen to anyone else" is a thought i can see people having.

@@Pontif11 positive stereotype about a country being “up to code” in all aspects of society can be dangerous. IAEA investigators concluded japanese authorities were acting as both regulators and industry promoters, had suppressed any gov criticism out of a culture obsessed with “saving face”, and had not thoroughly examined earthquake/tsunami response plans…despite living on one of the worlds most active fault lines. It is worth noting Fukashima was an epic disaster not from verifiable radiation exposure (which scientists to this day still haven’t linked to negative population health effects), but from bureaucratic arrogance that thought relocating sick and elderly patients was a good idea, resulting in significantly more death, injury, and trauma than was probably warranted.

@@adamboey4132 i don't know why you are telling me this. People stereotype anyway. I'm just mentioning it might be an exacerbating factor.

@@adamboey4132 The fact that the failures of nuclear are largely human failures is not terribly comforting, because we haven’t yet made a better human.

@@adamboey4132 you and I both know that FUKUSHIMA destroyed the ecology of the pacific… the reason the salmon don’t return, the fires, skyrocketing cancer rates… we know it’s your job to claim otherwise.

"news"

You're a 6th grader that remembers the 80s? Dang they're making the 6th grade so difficult to pass nowadays

And yet, for some reason, your doctor prescribed it...

@@Simboiss because it was medically necessary. Sometimes life only lets you choose between bad and catastrophic, doctors have to make decisions like this all the time; the point you’re trying to make is inane at best

The one and only reason why the West is abolishing its nuclear powerplats and that is POLITICS. Russia produces most of the Uranium, most of the nuclear reactors and the West rather shoots itself in both legs just to cut away from Russia. The leadership is so screwed they are waling the Europe into a massive energy crisis, stealing all of the savings from majority of its citizens in order to cover high energy costs.. This is a hit job on the highest scale, thats how corrupt or demented the politicians are..

@@Simboiss The alternative is eventual death.

@@metamodern409 "The CTs are probably doing more damage than any potential for the reemergence of your particular cancer." Maybe you can't read. This sentence means the CT scans do more harm than good.

Depends where you live though. I live right on the Ring of Fire close to active volcanoes (and home to some of the largest recorded eruptions in history) and reasonably frequent earthquakes. With that in mind, I would not feel comfortable with a nuclear power station nearby. If I lived in other parts of the world... I'd probably feel quite differently about it.

​@@nzwj in your case, geothermal would be more suitable. But in geographically stable regions, nuclear could be a real contender!

@@nzwj Modern nuclear reactors arent in danger of earthquakes, even the fukushima ones and the two nuclear plants next to it survived the earthquake with no damage, the problem was one plant had ignored the rules about their sea water wall and had damage due to that... and even still Japan is going big into nuclear now feeling safe with it.

tell that to the communities poisoned by the mining process, especially Diné communities.

Agree. For transition nuclear is very viable for short term usage.

"quick"?

@@sirmiles1820 I dont know, but at least 10 years doesnt sound "quick" to me...

but nuclear is 100% green

Isn't he married with kids?

Oh, interesting. Ironic.

right!!

Seems like she pretty much did all the work and then he just put it on his channel…

simp

I think a better example would be with transportation. Airplanes are the safest way of transportation but if a plane crash happens it will be all over the news and the whole world will know aboit it. Compare that to car/road accidents which are the leading cause of deaths and injuries from transportation and technically the most dangerous, but is still the most accepted and normalized. People know car accidents happen but there is something that makes a plane crash way scarier than a road accident because it touches that primal fear of heights and hopelessness if something happens to a plane mid air and cause it to crash. Even tho the microwave thing is still valid point in a way, I think it's much less of a problem for people and more like a conspiracy amoung some rather than a direct parallel with Nuclear. But I'm glad Nuclear energy gets attention recently and clearing a lot of misconceptions and myths about how dangerous it is. I applaud France for actually sticking with Nuclear when almost every other country tries to get away from it.

Well microwave ovens make use of radiation but that's a different kind of radiation, non-ionising, RF. With every microwave quarter cycle, the inherent dipoles of water molecules in the food flip orietation and generate what could be inaccurately described as frictive heating. But by and large i don't see what's terrifying about that at all. Other than if you had a hole in the shielding larger than 30mm, the microwaves would start falling out and heat you, they need a correctly built containment device. I mean obviously people should be cognisant of normal causes of death. Heart attack, pneumonia, stroke, car crash, an odd suicide, cancer and diabetes thrown in. That's pretty much it. That's a laundry list of problems you can't put enough effort into solving isn't it. But politically solving fake problems that don't affect anybody is THAT much more convenient isn't it, because you can "solve" them by doing nothing. 100% success rate.

I lived a couple miles away from one in Florida, never bothered me especially hearing that coal plants release more radiation than nuclear in normal operation. Now I'm living a 10-minute drive from a particle accelerator in Illinois 😅

I worked in a hotel restaurant kitchen that had a cheap microwave for the wait staff to heat desserts in, When cleaning it I found 2 small holes burnt through the door. Thrown out immediatly but how long was it shooting out waves at staff.

my place/house hasn't had a working microwave in 5+ years and im happy without it, at first it broke down/accident but after awhile its something i/90's-millennial-generation found i prefer to live with out one for now

Good point. Nuclear is scary for everyone, solar/wind only for the workers.

Basically, it's a bunch of nimbys blocking this.

Potential splash damage, even the worst estimate of death caused by Chernobyl are in the thousand (3k) because of radiation, Fulushima only killed because of the quarantine enforced and stress it caused. Now compare those possible deaths to accidents to the very real millions of people that die each year from pollutions. Add it to the thousand that die to get those fossil fuels. Nuclear is safe and extremely regulated

thats a good point i feel like most people have a "out of site out of mind" mentality when it comes to things like this. if there is no chance that a death or accident could/would directly effect them. nuclear power can likely directly effect the life's of people who have nothing to do with it so thats what can make it scary

@@l.s.11 If we keep letting fear govern our lives we will walk ourselves straight into extinction.

Sounds like you should have gotten an A

@@stevemattero1471 i think i did haha, been a while

And unfortunately human nature will always be a factor in the potential safety of nuclear power.

Exactly. I’m fully on board with the idea of nuclear energy. We have the tech to make it safe and byproducts seem negligible when compared to other sources. My main concern with it is the human aspect of it. Unfortunately, the decision makers are often the least qualified and know nothing of the subject. For this reason, I still can’t trust this energy source 100%.

The local atomic plant here in southern ohio shut down decades ago. There is still hundreds of people working there dealing with the waste. The nearest school literally shut down because of insane rates of cancer within staff and students. Ive been offered more than double what I make to work there mutiple times. But 100% of everyone I know that has worked there has had cancer. You cant pay me enough to go get that cancer.

The glaring faults you mentioned were record breaking and weren't even the primary causes. If it wasn't for the design flaw of putting the backup generators in the basement, the disaster would've been avoided.

​@@JayPkneehonestly event with a serious accident nuclear energy as a much better impact on the environment than the simple use of fossil fuels and renewable

The problem I have with this graph is that it only counts deaths. Yet low-dose radiation is rather unlikely to kill a person, but will negatively impact their lives in a severe way, for instance through poisoning the thyroid (Thats why people get iodine pills after nuclear accidents). I have searched and not found a research paper that evaluates the amount of people impacted, and severity of impacts of nuclear energy on human health. My motivation for this inquiry is, that many people in Germany, 1500km away from Chernobyl, many people got thyroid cancer, directly correlating to the accident, yet these people are not accounted for when talking about the safety of nuclear. Now don't get me wrong, I am not trying to say that nuclear is as bad or worse of a health risk than fossil energy, but I feel the equivalence to renewables being a bit too nice.

@@tedzards509 interesting, I've always been a nuclear supporter, chernobyl specifically was mismanaged.

@@tedzards509 Very well said A very nuanced way of looking at this material that it’s not black/white but people should consider health risks as I think you mentioned especially if food and water is contaminated or health risks pregnant women would face

It's like a plane crash. Everyone remembers the most horrible plane crashes and some people are scared to take a plane because of them while no one talks about car crashes that happen all the time and most people aren't scared of cars while they cause more deaths per year than planes

@@lateksipumppu Cancer in general has many causes, thats why I specifically noted thyroid cancer as it is caused by the ionization through radiation of iodine, which the thyroid needs to function. And the ionized iodine doesnt work as it should (Im no medical professional so the mechanism could be completely wrong, but there is a correlation). But thyroid cancer is not the only impact that higher radiation has on the human body.

Professors liked overhead projectors since they can't lock up like Windows running PowerPoint...

this video mainly felt very lecture like in some university but homemade in some small house at the same time

Planned maintenance is not a power plant failure

Well, in 2022 France had to make some ordinary maintenance that was postponed because of the pandemic. Furthermore they are trying to extend the commercial life of some of their reactors (that on average are 35-40 years old, close to the end of their life): in order to do so they have to be carefully inspected in every single part and some components have to be replaced, in order to lengthen their life up to 60 years.

Yes. There is also to mention that states don't subsidies nuclear reactors that much anymore, because they always turned out to be way more cost and time intensive than initially planned. I'm talking about the newest ones build. Apart from that, it doesn't seem they are considering energy cost itself, which is the highest with nuclear energy. If we are talking about nuclear, it would make more sense to invest in nuclear fission, it's a topic for the future anyway, since even if we invest in nuclear reactors today, it would take around 15 years until they are build and produce energy, as we have seen from the latest ones build, and that isn't fast enough to fight climate change. It's time so seriously consider efficiency and post-growth scenarios for now, focusing on human wellbeing and sustainability instead of growth for it's own sake.

@@lielakoma Sorry, I corrected the sentence. Hope it is more accurate now.

When talking about electricity production in France, we also have to mention that, unlike Germany or Italy for example, they have been running on a low carbon source since the 80s and that this was the first year in decades in which they were a net energy importer (for a 4% of their year consumption), while normally they are a big net exporter of electricity. Here in Italy have been importing ~10/20% of our electricity consumption from France for decades.

Their is so many things people cant carr about every fucking thing. Their are many youtuber check sabina hossenfelder , arvin ash, history of universe,vertasium, sean caroll, and many more

In regards to transport tho, the perception is actually closer to what I'd consider the actual safety factor. Planes are considered safe because the stats being used is the death per km/miles, which is skewed in favor of that transportation that goes at 1000km/h and is used for long distance. If you care about the danger of dying each time you enter a plan, then it is about the same as each time you take a car (which factors in drunk-drivers btw). And way way higher than other transports, especially trains

But is humanity going to change and become totally reliable? Not trying to save a penny, not starting wars, not getting bored by routine, not making stupid mistakes? Sorry, can't see it. As long as you do not completely trust any country or government or cooperation... nuclear is not safe, even if it is in theory.

Very sensible take, I agree, I dont trust companies to not eventually cut costs at these facilities, thus creating unsafe working conditions for the the staff or somehow reduce the safety measures of the nuclear plants

Thanks god people base decisions on economic sense. Wind and solar generated energy is far cheaper than any other technology out there. The only reason countries are so keen on having nuclear reactors is: they want to have atomic bombs.

Yes. My high school science teacher frequently said if we put the money and resources that we did into the Manhattan project and applied them to dealing with the waste issue, it would be solved by now.

Fusion is a whole different ballgame than fission. I dont see much fearmongering over fusion cuz it's still seen as a sort of far off 'sci fi' concept(which to be fair, isn't an invalid perception in many ways), and I think once fusion does arrive, it's going to pass through skepticism a bit better once it's made quite clear that there's little fear of 'meltdowns' or anything like that and it doesn't produce the same kinds of waste and everything. Fusion is genuinely the holy grail of energy, and will be the thing that opens the door to civilization becoming something that will be totally unrecognizable from today.

Was nice. But could have gone a little deeper in how the data was collected and what uncertentys come with it.