You know, I suspect on the issue of nuclear energy as in many others people who are familiar with the technology are less likely to oppose it. However, here on ET opposition to nuclear power is not technically ignorant, so there is something different at play.

You were unfortunately not around for How can we talk rationally about nuclear energy? by Jerome a Paris on March 27th, 2007

Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?

So the only alternatives in your mind are 100% information and zero information?

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

Beat me to it.


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sapere aude

You need transparency and a good enough government, which doesn't need to be that great, in my opinion.

I think it always boils down to the assumptions made for nuclear risks. We come back to what was discussed in this "How can we talk rationally" thread you pointed to.

If you think that any anomaly related to anything nuclear is the end of the world, nothing will do but absolute perfection, which is not achievable.

The nuclear industry is like any other industrial operation. They spend their life dealing with breakdowns, mishaps, screw-ups, stuff that fails for no good reason and Murphy's Law. And none the less it works because the industry explicitly rejects the notion above. The key notions are design simplicity, defense in depth, redundancy, fast communication, return on experience and preventative action. And the factual record says it works very well.

Same at the government level. A lot of things can go wrong before the whole thing goes wrong. What you need to avoid is the situation in the US where a single fucker is able to crash the entire thing.

Interestingly, You'll note though that the GWB disaster is happening only because of the general acceptance for governmental secrecy. Take that away and GWB would have imploded 4 years ago. No Iraq, no New Orleans. Well, probably no Republican party for that matter.

Transparency is not a cure-all but it allows what's done in the nuclear industry, early action before things go really wrong.

Costa Rica abolished its military. Could it have nuclear power?

I don't know what the military has to do with nuclear power in countries without a nuclear weapons development programme.

Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?

O Colman, now you're being captious :-)  farmers all over the midwest of the US had wind generators as far back as the earlier days of utilitarian electric generation -- 1920's, 1930's, maybe even earlier.  nothing about wind power requires centralisation and massive bureaucracy, or even heavy security;  I've walked right up to the perimeter fences of wind farms and had a picnic, taken photos, etc. -- and there hasn't been a guard tower, a camera, or a security checkpoint anywhere in sight.  I don't know of any nuke facility (US anyway) where you can drive, bike, or walk right up to the perimeter fence and hang out for long w/o becoming the centre of attention for serious people carrying sidearms.  which is probably just as well;  but that's why I say the technology exists in symbiosis with heavy security.

no one seriously imagines terrorists trying to steal the blades off your wind turbines to make WMD.  stealing weapons-grade uranium or plutonium, however, is quite imaginable -- security experts lie awake nights worrying about this sort of thing.  maybe they could be doing better things with their lives.

and despite all the layers and layers of precautions and defence-in-depth trying to compensate for risk-in-depth -- clever and careful as they are -- it just takes one earthquake to shut the biggest nuke facility in the world down w/o a restart date...

an earthquake in Japan this week rattled the Kashiwazaki nuclear power plant. The plant's operator "said it had found more than 50 problems at the plant caused by Monday's earthquake," The New York Times reported, adding:

    "While most of the problems were minor, the largest included 100 drums of radioactive waste that had fallen over, causing the lids on some of the drums to open, the company said.... The company said that the earthquake also caused a small fire at the plant, the world's largest by amount of electricity produced, and the leakage of 317 gallons of water containing trace levels of radioactive materials into the nearby Sea of Japan."

    Meanwhile, accidents at two German nuclear reactors last month prompted German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel to call for the early shutdown of all older reactors there, reports Bloomberg News.

    Concern about the safety of Germany's 17 reactors has grown after a fire at Vattenfall's Kruemmel site June 28 and a network fault at its Brunsbuettel plant on the same day. Der Spiegel online adds:

    "It took the fire department hours to extinguish the blaze. Even worse, the plant operator's claim that a fire in the transformer had no effect on the reactor itself proved to be a lie.

    In short, the incident made clear that nuclear energy is by no means the modern, well-organized, high-tech sector portrayed until recently by politicians and industry advocates. Indeed, the frequency of problems occurring at Germany's aging reactors is on the rise. Just as old cars succumb to rust, nuclear power plants built in the 1970s and '80s are undergoing a natural aging process.

    On Wednesday, the chief executive of Vattenfall Europe AG stepped down. Klaus Rauscher was the second manager to depart this week amid mounting criticism for the utility's handling of a fire at a nuclear plant in northern Germany, reports the AP.

CSM

I note that early press releases from Japan claimed that only 1 liter of mildly radioactive water had been leaked "harmlessly" into the sea and that the plant would be up and running again very soon.  as more and more damaging facts leaked out, the story (like climate change science) has morphed over the last few days into something more serious -- not disastrous, but fairly serious.  if you had lived with the US NRC for a few decades, you'd now be asking yourself, "And what haven't they told us yet?  What will we find out 40 years from now when the fear of lawsuits has abated and the real documents are finally released?"  

I really envy those who enjoy the happy condition of not expecting their government to lie to them...  ahhh you lucky French.  but this is what I mean by "secrecy" -- and it applies to the incident at Bhopal as well, where proper treatment was impossible because the company refused to share an analysis of the chemical compounds released, claiming intellectual property right to proprietary formulae.

... nuclear enthusiasts [as opposed to the "hold your nose and glow" type who simply think nuclear waste proliferation is an acceptable alternative to using a manual toothbrush or a smaller TV] sometimes remind me of brash young men I occasionally encountered in my younger days, who always wanted to drive at very high speeds.  any complaints from the passenger would be dismissed with heartfelt (and often condescending) lectures on the superior intelligence, skills and reflexes of the driver, the superior technology of the car, its custom rollbar, etc;  but it always seemed to me to dodge the question:  why take the risk in the first place?  and particularly, why impose that risk on other road users and the hapless passenger?  

I think the real point here is that while a solar/wind enthusiast can go off the grid, build an energy-efficient home, reduce demand, and enjoy the technology of their choice w/o materially harming other people much [modulo the toxicity of pv and battery manufacture which is deeply troubling to me], the nuclear enthusiast cannot build a little nuke plant in the garage to play with.  the tech is far too dangerous for amateurs to fool around with, and I think that demonstrates the "con" case as clearly as anything.  I can make my own wind gen out of used car parts, canvas, wood, an old oil drum... but I can't build a little nuke for my homestead.  and for good reason.  the technology is inherently lethal and requires strictest regulation, control, oversight, surveillance, blah blah.  for both technical and security reasons it does not scale down well, meaning that it encourages hypercentralisation.

the nuclear enthusiast cannot indulge in their fascinating (I do admit it's fascinating) hobby without projects of Pharaonic scale, endangering fairly large demographics of Other People, and this (like SUV driving and other risk-externalisation paradigms) I think this must be a core trait of a nonconvivial technology.  

the risk to other people, furthermore, is almost impossible for those other people to assess and detect for themselves without high technology (dosimeters, whole-body assays, etc).  their only recourse is to "trust the experts," and "just trust us" is not something I like to hear from any elite :-)  if one of your wind towers is starting to lean dangerously due to foundation subsidence, your neigbour across the property line can see that, assess the degree of lean, hike over and inspect the base of the tower, take some digi snaps, and demand that you fix it.  but if your nuke plant may or may not have released cesium (or worse), neighbouring residents can hardly afford the kind of assay needed to determine for sure whether their safety is imperilled or not, whether the leak occurred or not, whether it was greater than reported, etc.  they need Experts to tell them, and the available Experts are most likely working at the plant :-)

same is true of all/most highly toxic chemical operations, and there is often not much excuse for them either, i.e. there are less-toxic ways of achieving similar results, but someone has got themselves a cosy market niche doing it the toxic way.

I'll be generous here and admit that the biggest hole that can be made in this argument of mine is ... Public Transit :-)  after all, the public relies on a small crew of experts to operate the trains, maintain the trains and tracks, etc. -- you can't build your own personal railway, unless you're extraordinarily wealthy, and the average train rider doesn't understand switching gear, scheduling software, tunnel construction, etc.  the relevant diff I think is visibility of results.  there is no mistaking a rail crash, or a breakdown or delay.  anyone can perceive it, and its effects, in realtime.  there isn't the "lethality 30 years delayed" problem which assists greatly in mystification, or the invisibility/insidiousness problem which undermines trust and hinders accountability in both toxic chemical ops and nuke ops.  and rail operators look damn silly standing around saying "trust us, nothing really happened" in the middle of a derailment.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...