<story><title>Public&apos;s Dread of Nuclear Power Limits Its Deployment</title><url>https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2019/may/nuclear-power-limits.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jwr</author><text>I have conflicted thoughts on this. On one hand, nuclear energy seems to be the only way we have right now to at least try to avoid the oncoming climate catastrophe. On the other hand, I&amp;#x27;m reading &amp;quot;Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies&amp;quot; by Charles Perrow and it&amp;#x27;s scary. Really scary. The combination of very complex systems with interactions that no one understands and greed, poor oversight, and other human behaviors results in something we should be afraid of. And yet, we might have no choice but to use nuclear power.&lt;p&gt;By the way, official statistics are one thing (I used to love quoting them as well), but if you look at the number of &amp;quot;close calls&amp;quot; that we had and if you look into the causes behind various incidents, a different picture emerges and you might lose some of the confidence.&lt;p&gt;I also now think that anyone taking part in the discussion should read Perrow&amp;#x27;s book.&lt;p&gt;One thought I had while reading the book is that these days it might make sense to try to model these complex systems and run simulations to at least try to discover the unexpected interactions and mitigate them. Similar to (for example) how FoundationDB was developed. Simulations on that scale were likely difficult or impossible at the time when most nuclear plants were designed, but with modern computing power we might have better ways of reducing the problem domain.</text></comment>
<story><title>Public&apos;s Dread of Nuclear Power Limits Its Deployment</title><url>https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2019/may/nuclear-power-limits.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>keiferski</author><text>Correct me if I’m wrong, but nuclear energy fundamentally requires a strong state, at least one capable enough of maintaining facilities and disposing of the waste.&lt;p&gt;Looking at human history, the assumption that some state power will always be able to manage it seems rather naive. There have been long stretches of feudalism, warfare, and all-out anarchy and indeed the current relatively stable forms of government are not the norm historically. If all it takes to cause a nuclear meltdown is a brief lapse in order or relative peace, then that doesn’t strike me as very anti-fragile.&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, nuclear power requires and perpetuates government control over things in a way that say, solar energy, doesn’t. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on your political persuasion, of course.&lt;p&gt;That said, one could probably also make the opposite argument that nuclear power would lead to more incentives for peace and stability, in the same way that arguments for Mutually-Assured-Destruction argue that nuclear weapons prevent warfare.</text></comment>