I think it might be fine that fusion power may be more expensive in some ways than fission, as long as its reputation is kept clean (figuratively and literally). Market fusion power as the savior of humanity, and get enough people to believe it, and it'll be fine.
I think it's because of the occasional catastrophic failures that spatter our short history with the technology. Fukushima made headline news around the world, leaked large amounts of caesium-137 into the ocean, caused a 20km evacuation radius, is projected to take a total of 30-40 years to clean up, and people think of it as not that bad of a nuclear incident.
In comparison burning fossil fuels is a classic tragedy of the commons problem. Way less sensational. You can do math and say nuclear has a safer track record than coal/oil. You can point to design, engineering or management faults with historical failures. It doesn't change the fact that nuclear had a very fair chance at being the future and shown itself to not be trustworthy. If humanity was a little more perfect maybe we could have pulled it off
Yes, something like 150k people were evacuated because of worries about radiation. What you don't mention is that the total number of people evacuated was 470k. Most of the people who had to leave their homes had to leave not because of anything nuclear but because the enormous tsunami destroyed their homes.
So the Fukushima story is: massive natural disaster that caused enormous destruction and tens of thousands of deaths; a nuclear power plant was in a badly affected area; the damage was expensive to deal with but the total number of resulting deaths was, er, maybe about 1.
1. People tried to ring alarm bells about the building codes (and the reactor specifically) not being able to handle earthquakes of a size Fukushima was likely to experience. They were on deaf ears.
2. Japanese government admitted guilt for poor oversight and regulation.
3. Three executives were put on trail for negligence. There were found not guilty, but that's not the same as innocent.
Airliners have the same problem, yet their spin doctors are much more successful. Everybody keeps believing they're the safest form of travel.
> caused a 20km
Questionable if that is actually necessary or just over-reaction.
But ultimately it's such an expensive and society-tier level of investment that it's at the whims and pressures more than almost any other technology that has benefited society in resent history. So likewise it's also most at risk of the downside of populist politics (short term thinking, highly reactive to noisy local issues, driven by emotional outrage, etc).
I wonder if it's prospects are even worse off now that's to social media.
Oh yes indeed. Nuclear energy is not legal in Italy, so I did some research:
We had nuclear reactors in the 80s, until we held a referendum on nuclear energy, 3 months after Chernobyl. The result: overwhelmingly against, so we dismantled our reactors. Decades later, the Government pushed for a new referendum. When did they choose to do it? 6 months after the Fukushima disaster... you can guess what did the Italian population voted for.
Is this true?
I always considered fission tech to be used for the following reasons, and none of them are economic. The number's I've crunched say fission isn't the economic choice, but that varies depends on how much value is placed on 'base load'.
1. Cold war era vanity tech. Nuclear weapons were used to end World War 2, and now they are just another infrastructure project for us.
2. Code shifted weapons research. Countries blame each other for this all the time in the nuclear non-proliferation era.
3. Strategic choice to avoid traditional energy imports (France, Japan).
After all we already have a giant fusion reactor just 12 light-minutes away from us! We just have to harvest that energy. The direction were already going (mostly market-driven nowadays actually!) is generation from renewable sources, flexible grids and storage systems to balance everything out.
Fusion could obviate the need for grid-wide storage systems which would be a huge advantage.
When you are building a power plant which has the capability of making a significant portion of your country permanently incompatible with human life, you generally want to be really sure you aren't going to have an oopsie.
At the contrary in renewables the learning cycle is in months so costs fall exponentially.
That's the real reason of high costs in fission, not red tape or public sentiment.
Already economic downturns corelate with fission problems, as plants are not properly maintained. We have one blowing up every thirty years atm. Our reach exceeds our grasp, and there is no shame in admitting to that.
Are you referring to the need for electricity now at the Ukraine plants? Newer technologies such as NuScale require no external electricity for their cooling. The reaction only occurs if there is water and when all the water evaporates then the reaction stops.
> Already economic downturns corelate with fission problems, as plants are not properly maintained. We have one blowing up every thirty years atm. Our reach exceeds our grasp, and there is no shame in admitting to that.
Gas turbines in aviation also blew up way more often in the past than they do now. Who says the blowing up of plants is a constant? There have been many improvements in safety. Also, apart from the Three Mile Island accident, there haven't been major nuclear problems in the US in the last 50 or so years. Furthermore, the thing that lead to the Chernobyl disaster is not possible, by law, in modern reactors. Furthermore, newer reactors require an extra casing of concrete which would also have contained the Chernobyl disaster. You can even fly an airplane in those newer housing buildings and nothing would happen (with the building at least).
I have yet to see such a world.
Probably the fact that it's literally the same thing that killed 140 thousands people in an instant and imposed the spectre of a nuclear winter upon us all, had its importance.
