Talk:Nuclear power reconsidered

Nuclear power is a controversial topic, and some of the controversies remain unsettled, even after the facts in the article are agreed on. This Discussion page will provide a concise summary from each side of these unsettled issues. Much of this discussion is collected from Internet forums, and we welcome updates to improve these summaries. See the ../editorial page for more discussion on editorial issues.

Sabotage scenarios are disaster porn

These sabotage scenarios are just disaster porn and should be deleted with prejudice. The arguments about terrorism are equally valid to municipal water treatment plants and hydro dams, but these are not challenged. How about a balanced discussion of the dangers of terrorism on public infrastructure? Maybe use Zaporizhzhia as an example:

There has been much hand wringing about the dangers of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant being subject to bombing, but these worries are far out of proportion to the potential risks. Certainly the bombing of expensive public infrastructure on which lives depend can be a catastrophe, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that we shouldn’t build towers just because a maniacal cult might fly airplanes into them.

We have evidence it is easy to kill tens of thousands of people by sabotaging a hydro dam in Zaporizhzhia. But what would be the damage of a nuclear facility being bombed?

Chernobyl is the best example—a reactor with no containment building exploded and burned for over a week. The result? 29 immediate deaths, and the loss of 1 GW of clean high capacity factor electricity. Decades later the UNSCEAR has reviewed the available health data, and determined that there have been roughly 6,000 additional cases of thyroid cancer and 15 deaths a couple decades later, all of which could have been avoided had the Soviet government admitted the accident immediately and taken a few simple safety measures.

We now know from various studies that evacuations following nuclear accidents have been significantly overzealous to the detriment of the life expectancy of the evacuees, due in large part to fear and ignorance. Almost all of the evacuees from the Fukushima region would’ve been better off sheltering in place. We now know that the impact of moving from Fukushima to Tokyo and experiencing what we consider as acceptable levels of fossil fuel air pollution, for example, would have resulted in a greater loss of life expectancy than staying put following the meltdowns.

It becomes apparent that when it comes to nuclear reactors, the only thing to fear is fear itself. --- Dr. Al Scott - The Rational View

Editorial Note: Most questions on reactor safety are best discussed in the context of a specific design. For a response to these sabotage scenarios, see the Safety section of the ThorCon article. David MacQuigg (talk) 11:50, 13 September 2022 (CDT)

Purpose of this article

The purpose of this article is to raise questions and establish criteria for evaluating the many nuclear reactor designs that are now being proposed as solutions to the global warming problem. Answers to these questions should be provided in the subpages linked in the Related Articles subpage. We want to keep this top article short and non-controversial, or at least well-balanced. There will be plenty of opportunity for questions and comments from skeptics on the Discussion pages. David MacQuigg (talk) 11:39, 13 September 2022 (CDT)

Ordering of proposed reactor designs?

Is there a reason (such as priority of interest) in the ordering of the proposed reactor designs? If no particular reason for the current order, might we please alphabetize them? That is what I did over on the Related Articles tab, for now. Pat Palmer (talk) 14:12, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes, it was just the order that I encountered them, and spent more time developing the articles. There are dozens of these new designs, so perhaps to put them on an even footing, we should move them all to the Related Articles tab. That would also be the place to list dozens of subtopics, which we don't consider worthy of mention in the main article, topics like the world supply of nuclear fuel (unlimited on any timescale we need to worry about). But back to the question of what to highlight in the main article, I would say let's pick the ones our editorial council finds most interesting. That could be 1) Furthest along in providing a near-term climate solution (ThorCon) or 2) Some unique and worthy feature, like ability to burn old bomb cores (MSCFR, Natrium) promise of generating zero-carbon hydrogen fuel (VHTR) or closest to existing reactor technology and thereby maybe more acceptable to regulators with thousands of pages of existing standards (NuScale). Perhaps we should make this ordering a reward to authors who will do a really good job in developing a citable version of an article on their favorite design. For now, we could move the undeveloped articles off the main page. David MacQuigg (talk) 21:16, 13 October 2021 (UTC)