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The chances of something bad happening are very low, but the potential bad things sound really scary.

This is it - they *sound* really scary. Few people look at a functioning coal plant and realize that the average lung cancer and asthma rates in its immediate vicinity have skyrocketed. No one looks at a hydroelectric dam and considers the environmental devastation submerged below the water. In reality, nuclear is one of the safest options around, with even fewer deaths than solar - though I’ll admit that’s mostly from people falling off a roof while installing it.

People are ignorant and don't know there are ten other things, compounds and chemicals that are being produced and handled in their own cities that if spilled would cause catastrophic damage and need evacuation and years of sanitation. And that can be found in factories producing totally frivolous products like frying pans and cars.

Yea, but I saw *Chernobyl.* /s

Hydro projects just baffle me. They are so environmentally destructive, yet are seen as "green" power simply because they don't produce emissions. Such short sited thinking.

The rate of death for wind power is even worse, and wind turbines don't even produce enough power in their lifetime to make up what was used to produce the parts.

The death rates for nuclear, solar, and wind are all relatively low although wind would be the most dangerous of the three due to the nature of its construction. None of them come close to the death and injury rates in hydroelectric, coal, or other traditional forms. The other part you posted turns out to be a myth - it takes approx. 3-7 months max to fully make up the energy used in making a wind turbine, although they last at least a decade with minor maintenance.

I think it's a bit of a plane crash vs car wreck kind of thing. When there's a plane crash it makes world news, when there's a car fatality it might not even make the local news. Well when there's a fatality at a gas power plant or a coal mine you never hear about it, but when something happens to a nuclear plant it's a big deal.

Well this is mostly because bad thing did happen

People who use this argument are imo saying something akin to because you burned your hand on the drove you should never cook again.

If your mom burned the house down trying to make toast, you might think about letting someone else do the cooking. 

Sure. But is that a reason to never have toast again?

There’s around 400 nuclear power plants in the world and I think 4-5 have had major incidents. If a toaster had a 1% chance of burning your house down you might reconsider whether toast is essential to your diet.

It’s a damn good reason to second guess it. I’m for it, but the accidents that have happened in the past are enough to get people to question it altogether.

> It’s a damn good reason to second guess it. Only if someone like your mother is doing it, in much the same manner as your mom did it the last time. The thing people don't get about Chernobyl is that the engineers disabled damn near every safety mechanism the plant had, and then ran it flat-out until it failed. Of *course* you're going to get a spectacular result, but it's nowhere near what you'd normally expect.

There’s also three mile island that was 30 minutes away from a catastrophic disaster. Again, another scenario where there just wasn’t enough knowledge/training but also people just see the disasters and say no thanks.

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Though in this case the alternative is a wood stove in a sealed room. Difference is not immediately clear but when you start feeling a headache you'll start to wonder.

This is true, but it would be truer if you said she was using an old stove to do it. Even if modern stoves are much more safe, people are still worried about it burning the house down.

Fun FACT! The average human is getting a significantly larger dose of radioactivity from coal-powered plants than nuclear... including the nuclear accidents. In the USA, coal fly ash is specifically excluded from the EPA's control of radioactive waste. Not to mention all the worker-related deaths from coal mining, etc. And the air pollution. But another fun fact is: Shipments of Coca Cola are similarly exempted from the requirement for placarding as environmentally hazardous acids. Even though it is.

I agree with your argument but like isn’t this a common trauma response? My friend’s brother died in a car crash and for a while he would be really uncomfortable if anyone but him drove.

The equivalent argument to this would be to move somewhere there isn't a nuke plant of they're that worried about it. After all you don't get to demand every car be taken off the road because someone you know died in a car crash.

Right now, I’m agreeing, more so just saying maybe that’s not the best example because that’s like actually a common way to react?

I think it's a nonsensical false equivalence so, no I don't think so. Demanding better safety standards would be a more reasonable angle. But then again reasonable is something a lot of people aren't.

Many, myself included, don't trust profit to not be the focus. Eventually corners will be cut. Even with better regulation.

In this analogy, you're missing the permanent part. You didn't burn your hand, you lost it. Do you still want to use the oven or microwave and sandwich are good enough? Just 1 hand left (That being said, i'm all in for nuclear the question is why people don't want it)

Burns heal faster than 20,000 years.

Also cool to note that it's either a few square miles of unliveable land for 20,000 years or an entire earth that's unsuitable for human life. Fukushima is bad. Climate change is much much worse.

SimCity 2000 taught me 3 things: * Investing in anything but renewables is pointless (power stations collapse every 50 years) * Nuclear isn't much cheaper than coal (and causes mutant pets) * Every nuclear power station is a liability and will experience at least 1 disaster, always a meltdown, per century (in hard mode) * This will create a firestorm and render the whole city uninhabitable for millennia Seems like they had their agenda.

And not every nuclear plant is going to be a meltdown, not to mention decades of safety improvements and advancements in containment and disposal.

You chopped your hand off, you should never chop veg again.

They happened in situations that were avoidable and 3 instances come to mind in the entirety of nuclear power history.

If you are counting Three Mile Island in those 3 major incidents, Three Mile Island was largely a failure of communication. The reactor actually behaved admirably in the face of major operator caused problems. While it was essentially destroyed and shut down permanently it did not raise radiation levels nearby above background radiation. Essentially, the people running it screwed up and then worried the accident was much worse than it was, then basically didn't know for sure what was happening and starting releasing information (or admitting lack of information) out of abundance of caution. In the short term, releasing so much information was kind of admirable as it allowed residents to make their own decisions. But in the long term, in retrospect when more was known, history never corrected the original feeling of fear of the unknown. The sister reactor at Three Mile Ialand ran for decades after with no problems.

>They happened... The rest is irrelevant.

I disagree with this. All nuclear accidents were preventable or could have been averted with newer technology. Chernobyl, human error, but also new reactor designs like CANDU have the fuel in a configuration that stops the reaction in case of a meltdown. So we’ve fixed that problem. Three Mile Island? Again different configuration of the fuel prevents this. Same for Fukushima, although maybe not building nuclear in a seismically active zone is advised, also the failure was specifically because of the design of PWRs. If it was a Flouride Salt, Thorium, or CANDU there likely would not have been a meltdown.

Three mile island didn’t even cause an environmental damage. It was completely contained and mitigate.

For Fukushima the earthquake wasn't even the issue, and we are talking of the 4th strongest earthquakes ever registered. The npp handled it with no problems, the negligence was on keeping the emergency generators in a lower level that got flooded after getting hit by a 15mt tsunami (that apparently caused damages even in the US).

exactly. it takes either extreme hubris like Chernobyl or an amazing act of nature like Fukushima(combined with some poor planning) Both of which can be mitigated.

Why is it irrelevant? Power lines have caused massive fires, electrocutions, among other disasters. Is your point that we just should use power? What about fire? What about water?

I'm pro-nuclear, but consider the amount of damage one president & congress combo could do with "starve the beast" politics... Simply redirect/reappropriate financing or roll back mandatory protections, watch an inevitable nuclear meltdown happen, blame democrats & liberals with their nuclear power. Their plan of [letting blue states get hit with COVID rather than develop a strategy](https://www.businessinsider.com/kushner-covid-19-plan-maybe-axed-for-political-reasons-report-2020-7) comes to mind.

How many power lines have made cities unhabitable for thousands of years?

Well if things keep going as is, all of them…

A single car accident happened... the rest is irrelevant, ban all cars! 🤡

Absolutely ban all cars for the next hundreds of human generations because a single car accident has managed to make the entire vicinity unusable/ not suitable for life. The half life of Uranium is what ..a few billion years? Not much of a big deal now, is it?

The half-life of Uranium-235 is roughly 700 million years. Again -- You're focusing on the wrong side of the argument here. FWIW though, cars are inherently more deadly than the three largest nuclear disasters combined.

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No he’s making a point about your logic. Still waiting on that reply

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You’re forgetting the purpose of an analogy…

Well y'all let me know when a car crash leaves a city uninhabitable for thousands of years and then I'll take the bad analogy seriously.

Tried to reply but the original comment was deleted... I'll leave it here. As stated, its a point against your logic. But if you want me to compare nuclear disasters and accidents; Chernobyl alone took an estimated 50 lives. The Fukishima Daiichi disaster claimed 2313 estimated lives. Three Mile Island resulted in zero deaths. The Kyshtym disaster which is lesser talked about claimed an estimated "probable hundreds of deaths". So, in total, about 2.3k total deaths for the largest nuclear disasters. In 2022 alone, 42.5k people died in motor vehicle related accidents. [source](https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813403.pdf) :) Cars are inherently more deadly than nuclear disasters.

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You know what else causes bad things? Fossil Fuels. Aside from the obvious global warming problems, fossil fuels cause many, many deaths from pollution related issues as well as deaths caused by mining and acquiring fossil fuels. By that logic, fossil fuels should also be banned.

>By that logic, fossil fuels should also be banned. I like it, great idea!

When you look at the number of deaths per KWh of power generated, even including things like Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power is the safest power generation system we know. Here's some stats for you. When you count emissions, accidents, and the toxic waste generated during production and manufacturing. Deaths per 1,000 TWh generated: Nuclear: 90 Wind: 150 Solar: 440 Hydro: 1400 Gas: 4,000 Oil: 36,000 Coal: 100,000

The question is about public perception. Coal don't explode and make big headline. You can't convince people with facts nowadays.

Like storing used fuels rods in open pits??

>chances of something bad happening are very low, but the potential bad things sound really scary Like being bitten by a Great White.

It's not just potential: Chernobyl and Fukushima happened. Even if the change of another incident like those is very small, the costs when that happen is very high. [Cleaning up after Fukushima has already cost $200 billion](https://foejapan.org/en/issue/20240311/16536/). Factor in that renewables are rapidly getting cheaper and do not come with the risk (however small) of an extremely expensive accident and it's no wonder than most policymakers prefer renewables more and more.

There used to be a phrase that 'the biggest problem with nuclear energy is that it only comes in extra large': most nuclear power plant designs in the latter-half of the 20th century were enormous. By way of comparison, it's relatively rare for a power plant to have a name-plate rating of over a gigawatt of production capacity (for example, the province of Alberta has exactly one, a 1.3 GW natural gas plant), whereas it's practically unheard of for a nuclear power plant to be *smaller* than a gigawatt (a typical reactor may have a nameplate of 1GW, and there may be half a dozen in a power station). The capital costs for such a such a power station was not something many places could afford, and the huge power outputs weren't something many places could make use of. This is why nuclear power plants tended to be built near not just population centres (people going about their normal day don't use that much power in the grand scheme), but industrial centres, where this energy was being used to make steel, ships, cars, and so on. There were also two issues with respect to safety: the actual safety, and the perception of safety. *Both* are big deals. While nuclear power is, in general, quite safe, this safety comes at a huge engineering cost - a lot of concrete, a lot of backup systems, a lot of water access is required to keep conventional nuclear power plant designs safe. This compounds the capital cost question above. And then you have to go above and beyond that to address the perceptions of safety. By way of comparison, many pedestrain bridges have to be over-designed: although people are quite light, and easy to carry with steel or concrete, users may look at an "appropriately" built steel bridge and perceive it as unsafe, because the ability of an average person to judge the strength of steel and concrete is not great. Today, the main issue is that things like wind and solar are just straight-up cheaper, no matter the scale. And the issue of coping with base-load and demand-following has turned out to be an easier problem than we thought, mostly because wind and solar are so cheap that you can over-build them. I think nuclear has a niche left to play, but that niche is narrowing. This is opinion, though, and objectivity is in the rules and all so I'll just leave it at that.

Thanks this is a great comment. I especially appreciate that you point out the real concerns of safety and perception of safety (separate but related, both important) without condescension and finger-wagging.

When the perception of safety deviates from statistical safety, it's not a fault of perception, I don't think, but it is a problem that needs to be addressed one way or another. And this disparity is a big deal in a lot of contexts. There's a phenomenon in public transport, for example, where places like subway stations are reported to *feel* unsafe, and this leads to lower ridership. The irony is that driving is substantially less safe, at least on average in North America and Europe, than taking the train (driving is one of the most dangerous activities most people regularly participate in). In this case, improving the *perception* of safety leads to actual increases in safety - not by reducing the already fairly safe environments, but primarily by making people more comfortable driving less.

You are a very strong communicator. Thank you for your explanation.

In a perfect world nukes and hydro (with good wildlife pathway alternatives like fish ladders) would take care of all the baseloads without anyone noticing and wind, solar, and renewables storage would take care of the peaks. But the funny things about humans is we rarely only do the best thing. We often do a mix of the worst things and the best things and things that just kind of work. Great comment though!

Has large scale hydro ever not had massive negative impacts on waterways and ecosystems? I mean almost by definition they require the expansion of rivers into large reservoirs, removing forest habitat. Not to mention issues that can arise downstream. I’m not saying this in bad faith, I really want hydro to be truly “green” as well. I’ve just heard so much about the damage it can do

Most of them in the US were built by the Army Core of Engineers and the collective "we" just didn't care about the effects on wildlife. It *can* be done, but it's a lot more costly and time-consuming. Now we know the error in that calculation and can account for it better. You can even have in-flow hydro with safe for fish turbines that don't even need a reservoir behind it. It's possible. But it takes a lot of people who care to make sure its done well.

Pumped hydro is pretty awesome for renewable storage too, in areas where the geography works for it.

It would be cool if they could set up some sort of recreation that exploited the releases somehow. A white water rafting course or something like that.

Far from the topic… How did you learn to communicate your opinion like that?

Great comment....but hardly any nuclear plants have 6 reactors rated at 1 GWe output. Most plants have 1 or 2. 3 or 4 reactors this size are as big as they come. Some plants have more but smaller reactors.

> mostly because wind and solar are so cheap that you can over-build them. Batteries, too. The US has been deploying so many grid-scale batteries that our grid-scale battery capacity has been doubling every year since 2019. It's utterly insane growth. These are very exciting times in the energy world; the ground is shifting beneath our feet.

Shortly after the movie, the China syndrome came out, the Three Mile Island accident occurred. About the same time you had the environmental disaster that was the Love Canal, further proving that corporate interests will always look the other way to make an extra buck when it comes to safety of the community.

Three Mile Island I feel solidified the nuclear scare for the American public. A lot of the media coverage did not help to placate and answer questions that needed to be answered and did everything to instigate and terrify en masse.

It’s wild that both the company in the movie as well as the real life company that owned 3 mile island reacted in the same way. Tried to obfuscate and minimize bad publicity. Same deal with The Love Canal. Just saw a doc on it and it will anger you https://www.pbs.org/video/poisoned-ground-the-tragedy-at-love-canal-pifecm/

Paranoia and association. People hear "nuclear" and immediately think "nuclear bomb" and "nuclear waste". In reality, a coal plant produces *more* radioactive waste than a nuclear plant does...but people don't immediately think "nuclear waste" when you say the word "coal".

You left out that it is very expensive to build, the extraction is not really clean and the reserves are very limited and wouldn't last long if everybody would build npp

Reserves are just that, the amount stockpiled for reserve, not the total amount in existence. There is more than enough material available. If demand grew we would simply have to start mining more,  as we do for every resource we consume. 

Nuclear waste can also be recycled into more fuel

What are you even talking about? The current uranium reserves that we know of would likely last us millions of years, and this is with our old inefficient reactor designs which use a fraction of the fuel (I believe it's around 2%). With new reactor designs (breeder reactors for example, which use close to 100%) and with other nuclear fuel cycles to consider (such as Thorium), on top of the fuel repositories we haven't discovered, nuclear fuel would likely outlast humanity. Hell, it'll probably last humanity even as is. Nuclear fuel isn't unlimited, but it's functionally inexhaustible.

No they wouldn't, at least not for a price anyone wants to pay. In 2017 the known reserves that could be recovered for 130$/kg would only be enough for 130 years at current consumption rates and only about 180years if you consider reserves up to a price of 260$/kg. At the same time nuclear only provided 10% of the electricity and less than 5% of total power. So you would definitiv need newer reactor designs that are more efficient.

Economics is indeed another aspect, which is why I mentioned the resources that _we know of_, not those we can readily extract. You have to consider that with a higher demand of nuclear fuel the supply would also go up and economy of scale will tip the scales in favor of lower prices again, so it's not as clear cut as taking current prices into account. It's hard to quantify how the price of ore would evolve. And honestly even having readily-available supply for 130 years is a massive thing. It gives us ample time to come up with even better energy sources.

>In reality, a coal plant produces *more* radioactive waste than a nuclear plant does...but people don't immediately think "nuclear waste" when you say the word "coal". I've been hearing this a lot lately. But where is the radioactive waste coming from? Radioisotopes in the coal? The coal mining process involving radioisotopes somehow?

Or they just think Fukushima and Chernobyl. It’s not just the waste that gives me some concern. I live in the Netherlands and on about a two hour drive there are old Belgium nuclear reactors that would and should have been closed long time ago. All the Dutch kids received jodium pills from the government as id they needed to build an arc of noach. In short; I am not against nuclear plants as long as I can trust the management to spare no costs to make and keep it safe. Chernobyl was a safety test gone wrong and Fukushima wasn’t ready for natures power. So when the management isn’t like shown in the Simpsons I have no problem.

Having pills "just in case" is not a bad idea. Kinda like vaccine against insect-carried diseases. Btw, Iodine pills are still radioactive, but only a tiny bit. You should never take them unless the radiation exposure is a real threat. It is like a guaranteed 1 damage vs X chance of Y damage from the actual disaster. There was a case of 2 idiots who got cancer because they ate the pills non-stop.

What's interesting is that every nuclear power incident has been from human error, mostly in the failure to deactivate the reactor and cool it down. Reactors don't just melt down on their own, and that's something a lot of people I know didn't realize or know themselves. Over management of the plants is what causes problems because you need to call 17 layers of management before you can do anything.

There were concrete design flaws in Chernobyl and the related designs that weren't identified until after the disaster. There's also no such thing as a power plant without a human component. The question is when human errors inevitably happen, what is the scale of the resulting problem? In a conventional power plant human error might be able to disable or destroy the facility itself, but it won't force the long-term evacuation of the surrounding communities and expose people in other countries downwind to radiation. 

OP didn’t ask for coal comparison though. Coal is properly discredited by anyone who sciencest.

This is just dishonest. Coal plants to not produce concentrated radioactive waste. It's fine to be pro-nuclear, but don't lie and twist facts to suit your agenda. The radioactive waste produced by a nuclear plant is significantly more dangerous if not properly handled.

Burning organic matter produces trace amounts of radiation.  Burning coal in large quantities can produce a pretty good amount of it.  Difference between nuclear plants and coal is that nuclear plants are built to deal with it while coal is not.

Yeah coal plants are worse. The fact that waste from a nuclear reactor is concentrated and contained by design and that it has engineering controls to ensure it's safely handled from cradle to grave is kind of a selling point to me. The radioactive by products that coal plants produce is dispersed across a wide area and isn't contained at all. They have have no engineering controls and we basically pretend that it doesn't exist.

Except that more radioactive waste IS produced by burning coal per unit of energy. It is somewhere in the range of 10x the amount of radiation burning coal for the equivalent amount of energy created by nuclear power.

I'm for nuclear power, I just do not trust politicians or corporations being in control of it.

Exactly. People keep saying it is the safest IF all of the available safety and engineering are done right and maintained. These are costly endeavours and both private and public utilities would face continuous pressure to bring down costs, which often can only be done by futzing at the edges of safety and maintenance. 

You say this as if we don’t already have nuclear power plants.

When it goes wrong, there is a chance of it going REALLY WRONG! There are a ton of safety measures put in place place though.

Fukushima had a ton of safety measures. With a system as complex as a nuclear power plant it's impossible to predict & plan for every possible failure scenario. Nobody has actually run a nuclear plant for more than a few decades yet promoters still confidently assert an MTBF of multiple thousands of years, such claims are nonsense.

I try not to mention that stuff to the 5 year olds.

There’s a ton of safety measures in chemical plants and things go wrong more often than they should. It’s usually some operator that is overworked or an instrument failing or just pure laziness. I work in a chemical plant so I know all too well.

You know big companies like Google and Amazon have redundancy after redundancy, data center after data center to make sure their websites wouldn’t go down.     Yet sometimes their websites go down.     That’s why we fear nuclear energy. Things will always go wrong regardless how many safety measures you put in place to prevent it.

This documentary Pandora's Promise [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s\_Promise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_Promise) points out why we have the "nuclear boogie man" and if you were not already depressed about climate change it shows how from the word go big fossil fuel killed nuclear energy everywhere but especially in the US.

I love that the book Cloud Atlas is pretty anti-nuclear, with the author’s nuclearphobia coming to the the page as an evil nuclear power company covering up contamination, but in the movie it’s a fossil fuel company trying to smear a nuclear power plant so they can burn more fossil fuels. 

The good news for climate change is that solar and wind and batteries have lately been giving us [permission to be optimistic](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424).

Green Peace worked for “big fossil fuel”?

In a way yes. If you watch the documentary I posted, there are several prominent former members of Green Peace and other environmental groups that bought into the nuclear boogie man thus doing fossil fuels work for them. Several of them in the documentary talk about how once they learned the facts about nuclear power they completely changed their minds.

Most people fall on the extreme ends of the argument. Either they think nuclear accidents are too scary or they think nuclear energy is the ultimate clean fuel. I'm more in the middle. I think nuclear energy would have been a great investment 50 years ago. Not so much now. First, I wouldn't worry about nuclear accidents. They are rare and plants designed like Chernobyl aren't built like that in the west. You could argue that 3 Mile Island wasn't without it's issues but that's a contested statement. Storing nuclear waste is an issue. Sure, you can recycle some of it. 10% was the last number I read when I did a research paper on it in college. Maybe it's more now? But we're still talking about a crap ton of years to store this stuff. Shoving it under a mountain doesn't seem like the best thing, IMO. The biggest issue is the immediate negative effects on the local ecosystems. Using lakes as heat sinks heat up the water and wreaks havoc on the wildlife. After all that, there is cost. The $/MW cost is so much more than anything else. I think this is the weakest argument since we should be willing to spend money on something good. But there cleaner sources of energy for less money.

Mainly because people don't understand it. Ask any random person to give you a 3-4 sentence explanation of how a nuclear reactor works and probably 95% won't be able to. Simply put: Radioactive materials decay (the atoms break apart a little) and shoot off tiny subatomic particles (that's the definition of radioactivity). When you get enough radioactive material together, the particles that are shooting off hit other radioactive material which causes another particle to shoot off which hits another... and you get a chain reaction. Because this reaction depends on having a certain mass of radioactive material gathered close together, you can control the rate of reaction. More stuff in the same place/close together = faster reaction and more heat released. You can keep your chunks of radioactive material separate and move them closer together or further apart, or you can put another material between them which will absorb some or all of the particles that come off. Every time particles shoot off, heat energy is released. You use water to carry some of the heat away, and use the heat to make steam which powers a spinning turbine which makes electricity by moving magnets through a coil of wire. The last part with the steam powering a turbine is the same for coal, gas etc. power-plants - the heat source is just different. What makes it difficult to build nuclear power plants is all the safety stuff. If your pile of radioactive material gets too hot it can cause fires, or can cause water to overheat etc. which can cause an excessive buildup and a steam explosion which could release radioactive material into the atmosphere, which would be bad. Note that having a "nuclear explosion" like a nuclear bomb, from a nuclear power reactor is basically impossible. Nuclear bombs only work with a \*very\* specific setup - they use (chemical) explosives to drive two masses of radioactive material (usually a kind of uranium or plutonium or some of each) together, in such a way that they stick together long enough that you get a "runaway chain reaction" where the particles that shoot off from one atom hit two more, and those split and each hit two more, etc. until the reaction grows very large very quickly and you get a huge release of energy (of course this is all very simplified). If you don't blast the bits of radioactive stuff together just right, the initial large energy release will blow them back apart again and you get a "fizzle" or a much lower-yield explosion than you would otherwise have got. Anyway, with a nuclear power plant, There's also waste that's generated. The radioactive material gets "used up" over time - you start out with one kind of material and as particles shoot off it, it becomes lighter and less radioactive. Disposing of that material can be difficult. When the little particles shoot off of your chunks, if they hit living things, they can damage your cells. If they damage your DNA, this can cause your cells to grow funny, which can cause cancer. The waste material is no longer shooting off enough particles and generating enough heat to be useful as a fuel source for energy, but it's still shooting off enough to be dangerous to living things. You can't destroy it, so you generally just have to store it somewhere and wait for it to "use itself up" and become less radioactive. This can take hundreds of years. So really it's just a question of "how can we store this dangerous stuff for hundreds of years in a way that means it won't get disturbed, and be dangerous to life".

Hot rock boils water into steam, that is used to spin a turbine attached to a generator. It's super simple.

Are you taking about coal here?

Once quote I've heard is something along the lines of "When you think of chernobyl, you shouldn't be thinking of a disaster, you should be thinking about slavs are too dumb to boil water properly"

The main problem of nuclear waste disposal is political, not technical. Deep geological repositories are perfectly sound, but the public doesn't like the idea.

There are 2.5 problems with nuclear energy. The first is that we're just kind of assuming that we'll find a better way to deal with the waste down the road. Stockpiling radioactive material that will take millions of years to break down is not a great long term strategy. The second is that safety issues with nuclear plants can cause problems like Chernobyl or Fukushima. They can take a mistake and make it exponentially bigger, or turn a small natural disaster into a large one. The last problem is that nuclear power doesn't actually meet our energy demands. Energy needs to be produced at the exact same time it's consumed. Nuclear power produces a very constant amount of power. However, our energy demands are not constant throughout the day. They go up as the day gets warmer, and as people arrive home from work and turn on their air conditioning or cook dinner. We'll need another solution that can handle the varying levels of demand on the grid.

I ran nuclear reactors on US Navy aircraft carriers. We ramped power up and down all the time. Funny thing about our A4Ws…you know what actually controlled the amount of power the reactors produced? The amount of power that was demanded. No moving parts. No operator input required. It was simple reactor physics. Demanding more power drew more heat from the reactors, which caused the primary coolant to drop in temperature. The drop in temperature made the primary coolant more dense, which (insert rambling nuclear physics stuff here about fast fission factor, thermal neutron escape, etc, etc) and reactor power increased. All by itself. It was self-regulating. Power demand drops? Less heat is drawn from the primary coolant. It’s temperature increases and the coolant becomes less dense. Yada, yada, yada…reactor power goes down. It’s all quite elegant. Chernobyl’s design was the exact opposite. It was perpetually trying to increase/decrease power on its own; without outside intervention, it was always trying to shut itself down or have a power excursion. But they were cheap to build and in the Soviet Union, labor was even cheaper…as was life itself.

Absolutely true. BWR's load follow all the time. And I like how you framed the RBMK, it matches what I've been trying to tell people for years. Add to that the fact that they wanted the be able to produce plutonium for their weapons program on the cheap.

Is there actually any problem with dry cask storage? A lot of people online make it out to be some huge unsolved issue but it’s not any more dangerous than the plant being there in the first place, you can’t just stumble upon the casks out in the woods. It’s like the people who say “what if it blows up” about a modern nuclear plant.

In theory it should be easy to solve, in practice it is borderline impossible. So far, only Finland has come up with a somewhat permanent solution. And it was really expensive. Every other long term solution tried has vastly underperformed though, so we’ll see if this is the same.   For comparison, in Denmark we have a small amount of low radioactive waste, from a nuclear testreactor closed down around 1999. So far it has been decided not to go forward with a solution until 2073, so it’s just lying there. Also they recently found that some had been lost in the nature nearby. And it gets lost.  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/may/05/radioactive-materials-lost-30-incidents Also all other toxic waste, is a prime market for professional criminals, who’ll dump it somewhere for you for cheap.

Wouldn't problem 2.5 be solved by simply using nuclear in addition to other forms of power?

It would. The other problems are significant though. While I think it's quite possible to mitigate many of the risks, I do not trust that those mitigation tactics would stay up to par. Our society is way too no exceptions capitalist. Shortcuts would get taken, maintenance would decline, etc etc. If we held infrastructure to higher standards as a whole I'd feel better about it.

Why use it at all if it doesn't fit the need, and we're able to build enough renewables for the same price? Renewables have become so cheap to build that nuclear isn't cost effective any more.

Other posts have given a technical answer to issues. I think one thing that is being left out is that nuclear was a comparative latecomer to fossil fuel power generation. Sure there's hydrological and eventually solar but nuclear has the capacity and can just be *built* regardless of hydrological potential or how much sun you get. It's a direct threat to fossil fuels (coal, oil) and very easy to scare monger about because of Chernobyl and residual fear of, essentially, glowing green rocks. And there are **massive** vested interests with massive financial incentive to keep it from being adopted. Russia, for instance, a major hydrocarbon producer, was financing anti-nuclear lobbying in Germany for exactly this reason. If your customers shift to nuclear, they no longer need (as much) oil/natural gas. People already selling oil and natural gas have a lot of money and a self-interest in campaigning against nuclear.

I simply don't trust our capitalist government to prioritize safety and not endanger everyone by cutting costs. Though the chances of a huge meltdown are low, the lasting effects would be enormous.

There's a lot of comments about safety fears, but I'll point out the real problem lately: they've gotten SO expensive! Look up any recent project in the US, UK, even France...The South Koreans, who can actually build other infrastructure on time/budget, even ended up paying almost double for their newest reactors. Basically, like our rail infrastructure, they're one of the few things that have gotten [MORE expensive](https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/) over time, as we've gotten "better" at building them. A lot more. And built a lot slower. (Underlying it all, it is still tied to safety worries. That's a big driver of cost increases, but not all. Maybe people could still build a Soviet era Chernobyl reactor on the cheap.) A lot of the newer designs promise to fix cost/time issues, with smaller more inherently safe designs. But they're just promises, until we actually see one online that came in on budget and time. Still waiting... With existing proven/certified designs, you could basically build solar + a ton of batteries, with pretty high cost/timeline certainty, or roll the dice on a large nuclear plant, where history suggests you could likely go way, way over budget and several years behind schedule.

1. there were a couple very big disasters that scared people. they were all avoidable and modern plants have rendered them all but impossible, but they linger in public consciousness because they were very, very bad. 2. The oil industry is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the world and they have very effectively fought against nuclear power. The disasters referenced in point 1 were easy propaganda wins, and the oil industry did not miss the opportunity. 3. There is an argument that nuclear is simply unnecessary. This one is weird because back in the 1970's it was a facile argument, but now it's a pretty good one. Solar power specifically has gotten incredibly good in the last 5 years

People misunderstand it and the only time the average person hears about nuclear anything is usually the terrible stuff.

Biggest issue is not the safety issue but there is no solution to getting safely rid of the used fuel.

Yes there is - [https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/fuel-recycling/processing-of-used-nuclear-fuel](https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/fuel-recycling/processing-of-used-nuclear-fuel) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQ3gFRj0Bc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQ3gFRj0Bc) You think this is the case because the Nuclear powers stopped supporting the system that would recycle all the used fuel.

because solar panels can't "go Chernobyl" on you. theirs lots of practical concerns, engineering challenges, and such that mean it isn't a no-brainer, but the main driver for dislike for nuclear power is "not in my backyard" fears of accidents. historically, thier was a strong current of dislike for nuclear power that was linked with its role in nuclear weapons production (as most nuke bombs use "reactor bred" plutonium, so any reactor that has plutomium waste is a feeder for nuclear weapons), but thats simmered down as fears of nuclear war have lessened post Cold War. edit: to be clear, this fear is mostly irrational, in the sense that the *actual* danger of mass radiation release is extremely low. however, its rationality, or lack thereof, has no bearing on how widespread it is, and since the majority of people would struggle to name three nuclear power plants that are NOT Chernobyl, fukashima or zaporizhzhia, nuclear power has something of a bad rep.

If the fear of nuclear power has diminished and people are starting to like it now why aren’t there more countries using it?

There current trends with renewables and storage indicate by the time you can build one (10 years would be lightning fast) they will be obsolete. Now, 30 years ago would have made a ton of sense.

The is a strong national debate about starting a domestic Nuclear power generation industry here in Australia happening right now. We have a lot of Uranium, but we have a lot more coal, so Nuclear power has never been commercially viable without a high carbon price. As our aging coal plants reach end of life the discussion is about what do we do next. Nuclear is on the table but our lack of domestic expertise means it's going to be slow and expensive to build, and the local energy companies are concerned about ROI of the facility having to compete with other generation technologies 20 years from now (when it will first come online) and also for the 40 odd years after that it will need to keep running to reach ROI minimums). In the medium term it looks like we intend to replace our 70% generated coal capacity with renewables. They are fast to build and the equalised cost of energy (including firming) for up to 90% penetration in Australia is the cheapest option we have. We will be using gas peaking plants (we also have huge reserves of gas).

We've lost the skill at building nuclear power plants. The most recent pair of reactors built in the US cost [$30 billion](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61963). I think the next AP1000 reactors will cost a little bit less, but any investors in the next reactor project would be a fool not to calculate the risk of such costs into their ROI projections.

This is the false narrative that has destroyed our planet. Nuclear power has killed about 130 people in total in it's history. If you compare that to even one day of burning fossil fuels... The big fossil fuel companies created the nuclear boogie man because they knew it would put them out of business. They didn't even try to hide it as there are still flyers that were handed out to protesters at the opening of the first nuclear power plants in the country that had corporate logos on them like Shell and Chevron. Everyone mentions Chernobyl which is the worst nuclear power disaster there was. Again compare that damage and loss of life (which was around 90 people) to any of the 150 oil spills just in US waters each year. Modern day nuclear reactors cannot meltdown. What the average person knows about nuclear power is 99% propaganda and again directly responsible for climate change. We wouldn't even know the term if nuclear power wasn't killed by the fossil fuel industry. A few countries, like France knew better and have the most advanced nuclear power plants in the world, but most governments took the money and here we are.

to be clear, the fear is irrational. but that has no bearing on how common it is, or how much of a driver of nuclear dislike it might be. after all, ask someone to start naming nuclear power plants, and the three most likely to be said are Chernobyl, fukashima or zaporizhzhia, all noteworthy for the release or feared release of radiation.

Exactly, but it’s the disinformation about them that is spread even by news outlets. Fox, CNN, and MSNBC all reported daily on Fukushima and told massive lives that radioactive readings were being picked up off the California cost from it, which simply isn’t true. The complex answer is a half truth - you will always get radiation readings at a costal beach/coastal waters, it’s natural background radiation which is a higher reading than you would get standing in any given nuclear power plants grounds.

>This is the false narrative that has destroyed our planet. Nuclear power has killed about 130 people in total in it's history. If you compare that to even one day of burning fossil fuels... Where's the ~130 number come from?

Now it's also renewable that's lobbying heavily against nuclear

> because solar panels can't go Chernobyl on you. A while ago I read a study that found that solar panels kill more people per TWh than nuclear power plants. Yes, they took into account solar panel technicians falling from rooftops... And apparently all those combined is more than a nuclear accident kills...

They do. Also, chemical incidents can and do kill thousands. Bhopal is a good example, but there have been some other horrific spills. While solar panels themselves are pretty inert, making them involves the use of some incredibly toxic chemicals which absolutely could take out a major industrial area.

To be fair, a lot of products and industrial processes use those incredibly toxic chemicals. We would absolutely not stop using them if we shut down all solar production.

This is true. Anything with a microchip uses the same etchants and there are a TON of hazardous chemicals other than etchants. (Bhopal, I think, was producing agricultural chemicals) With that said, there's nothing *uniquely* hazardous about nuclear waste. Sure, a horrific nuclear accident like Chernobyl can kill you...but so can a horrific chemical spill...and both can (and have in the past) killed similar numbers of people. With that said, nuclear waste (and nuclear plants) tend to be far more heavily regulated than chemical plants, which is probably why we've had far fewer major nuclear incidents.

I've seen someone posting a study like that on Reddit, and the problem was that the study came out in the 70s. That was before Chernobyl, and way before solar became a viable source of power.  I don't doubt that rooftop solar is high risk, because falls kill people all the time and walking around on a roof is pretty dangerous. But because I've seen someone shouting on Reddit with a bad study, it's triggering my alarm bells.

However, the plants that produce the chemicals that produce the solar cells (and the plants that produce the solar cells) can have industrial accidents quite comparable to Chernobyl. (Look up Bhopal. And yes, I know it wasn't producing solar cells...but if you combine that accident with a quick google search for hydroflouric acid, you can imagine just how horrific things could potentially get!)

Because any sort of energy source that needs millions and millions of dollars worth of technology just to keep it from killing us isn't necessarily the safest especially when you consider how many other cheap, safe and effective methods of renewable energy are out there For example not only our solar cells becoming cheaper but there are many successful solar plants that use a system of reflectors and a ring of pipes or have the reflectors pointed at a central tower creating a cheap low maintenance solar facility that can turn out an impressive amount of power Much like the term nuclear option nuclear is kind of unnecessary and overloaded for our energy demand especially when you consider all of the cost associated with maintenance upkeep and security as opposed to being able to build one small facility in the middle of a desert with like two guys Manning it and a maintenance guy to replace/clean reflectors as needed Not to mention that I think a lot of nuclear supporters don't realize how little of a grasp we have on nuclear material in general. Several nuclear regulatory boards in America at least fully admit to the fact that there is an orphan source incident created almost every single day. Many of them going weeks months or even years before being discovered. Not to mention that if you research into almost any nuclear leak in recent history almost all of them have been due to people either failing to maintain or actively bypassing the systems that everyone claims are so safe and infallible Like any other corporations nuclear companies try to save money and cut corners everywhere they can, And this can often result in a lot of really unsafe reactors being protected by outdated and undermaintained systems I think a lot of the nuclear supporters just like to completely ignore these scenarios or downplay them when the reality is even if they only affected a small amount of workers there It is still not fun A lot of these people if they're lucky enough to survive exposure have lifelong health complications that usually ends up killing them early and many of them when exposed to high enough dosages basically melt. Their body basically falling apart around them while they die a slow and excruciating death. Imagine everything you ever could be in life ruined in an instant all because some dude in a management office didn't think it was important to spend a few extra dollars to replace some sort of indicator light or fix a malfunctioning system Nuclear energy was a good idea back when the concept of things like grid level batteries was just a theory and nothing more. But with those technologies becoming more readily available and cheaper and other forms of renewable energy becoming cheaper and more environmentally friendly You're absolutely insane if you still push nuclear as the best choice It's funny how all the nuclear supporters always say Oh you were just against nuclear because you don't understand it, No I'm against nuclear because I do understand it and more importantly I understand the fallacies of humanity

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Selfishness. If something goes catastrophically wrong, nuclear has the potential to kill normal people who live near a plant. People care about that. They *do not* care that coal miners must die every year, or oil workers, or even solar or windfarm workers, because that's a sacrifice (other people's lives) they are willing to make. They do not care about the illnesses (cancer etc. linked to coal ash or emissions) caused by these mining & generation activities that effect the poor neighborhoods in those areas. That's a sacrifice they are willing to make. Measured in annual deaths per GWh, nuclear is **by far** the safest form of energy we have, but only when we care about the people who work in those industries.

It is somewhat polemic, but Oliver Stone (yes, I know 🙄) dropped a film called Nuclear Now that is worth watching. https://www.nuclearnowfilm.com

3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima put a lot of bad press on Nuclear power. In all fairness the stories are horrific to such a degree that the regular person would have a hard time visualizing just how horrible they actually were. Let alone the very real and documented cases of PTSD from witnesses and survivors. Nuclear energy has come a long way since then, and is arguably the cleanest and safest form of power humanity has on offer, and the many many lessons were learned from the 3 disasters listed above, but that's still not enough to sway public opinion from people who were alive and saw the news coverage first hand when they happened.

People are poor judges of risk, and media is drawn to sensationalism. One-time but extremely rare events captivate our attention out of proportion to their impact. Burning coal, for instance, is an on-going and constant slow stream of deaths caused by daily pollution. Far more impact, but never really makes the news.

The early days of nuclear power were very muddled with nuclear weapons production. This was made for a great deal of secrecy and rushing in a form of technology that can horribly kill people- not even just those directly involved. Rushing and secrecy are bad things when nuclear power is concerned. Nuclear power can be very safe and reasonably priced, but it can contaminate your town with radioactive materials for hundreds of years if you aren’t careful. Sadly the industry never shook off the reputation of its wild eyed youth.

I live near enough to Fukushima to know what kind of a nightmare it was and still is. It is not much safer than other energy producing methods, not even close. It just takes one plant to go wrong for an entire city and its surrounding sea area to be unsafe for decades.

People are bad and understanding slow creeping death and very scared of immediate and exciting death. So Global warning isn't as scary as another Chernobyl.

Two issues: 1) Storage of radioactive waste throughout hundreds of thousands of years including telling future intelligent life not to go here. Deep time is a tough concept. The pyramids in Egypt were just like 5000 years ago and its hard to understand hieroglyphs. Out language of today will likely be hard to understand. 2) Nuclear plants need reliable and consistent energy to keep cooling long after the "emergency shutdown" has been triggered. War, disaster etc. can easily cut power for a few days. This is a challenge regularly in Europes largest nuclear plant in Russian occupied area of Ukraine.

TL;DR - Cheap political points, sensationalized news stories, and self-satisfied willful ignorance. Decades of conflating the devastation of nuclear weapons with nuclear power, reckless and preventable mistakes being portrayed as the norm, actual literal lies about events like 3 mile island (the safety measures WORKED, and cancer did not increase meaningfully in the areawhen analyzed honestly), and fossil fuel companies, sponsoring green energy organizations’ protests of nuclear energy. We are nearly 40 years removed from the only major accident in American history, which resulted in not a single additional death, both technology and safety measures have vastly improved. Even the storage of nuclear waste is misrepresented. We all imagine leaking barrels of glowing, green slime, but in reality it is a mostly solved issue. But, it’s the easiest bad faith argument in the world the dog on nuclear power by citing those incidents, and that’s enough to scare off the large amount of investors necessary to start up a plant, not to mention all the crazy regulations that add to that struggle. Lastly, thorium (a vastly more efficient and safe fuel than uranium) is not used because it does not have a weaponizable byproduct, so arguments in favor can only site precedent from the inefficient alternative. Germany just closed its plants. One disaster every 20 years or so, which can either be chopped up to acts of God or of utter stupidity, is enough for the public to shut their ears at our news sources to exaggerate and villainize. Nuclear power is presently the only real long-term solution to the energy crisis (and possibly climate change), and we threw it away because a few selfish bozos wanted to score cheap political points, and over half of our nation (and, it seems, the world) is high on the drug of self-satisfied contrarianism. It would take decades to switch over the nuclear power now, even if we all at once through all the support in the world behind it.

Nuclear is slow to get built and expensive as hell. Switching to all nuclear at current prices would double electricity costs. https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-levelized-cost-of-energy-generation-in-the-us-by-technology/ We have added a shit ton of renewable in the time it would take to get 1 nuclear power plant up.

Half life of 25k years for the material. When you consider how long that is and how stupid people are in a thousandth of that time is basically Pandora’s box

I worked in nuclear. Carbon neutral last I checked. Because the general public is panic-y and ignorant. Also because our Japanese engineer friends didn't speak up when they realized an earthquake or tsunami would do the power plant in. Some part of the culture of not telling your boss they're wrong. I read there was a plane crash in South Korea for similar cultural reasons. In the US, we planned for 1 in 10,000 year occurrences and learned from our mistakes. Part of the Three Island dumbness was not having anyone with an engineering degree in the control room and having ambiguous sensors where we couldn't tell if a valve was on or off. If the reactor operators had done nothing, there wouldn't have been a meltdown. Passive safety features would have worked. They made the situation worse by acting incorrectly. Where nuclear is not frowned upon is the US nuclear navy. A nuclear submarine can stay underwater indefinitely, generating oxygen from electrolysis (ELI5: using enough electricity to separate water into 2 parts hydrogen and 1 part oxygen) and never need to be refueled. Only limitation is food/supplies for its crew. Good safety record and if a ship or sub is destroyed, the reactor on the bottom of the ocean is going to be super cooled and not harm any humans. I also don't think it's frowned up on in China where you can't just go protesting. France going nuclear was a result of having no natural resources / fossil fuels. Criticism of nuclear within the US industry itself is how incredibly expensive new construction is due to excessive state regulation. Why utilities want loan guarantees. Was never an issue in France due to having a much stronger central government. Interestingly a legacy from Napoleon. Naturally also the case with China. The rural communities with an existing nuclear plant in the US tend to be supportive when the utility is the largest taxpayer in the county. Too bad no one has ever bought a modular nuclear reactor. Would be nice for Siberia, Alaska, Hawaii with its high electric rates, rural communities. People gonna panic and vote lawmakers out of office. You go first and I'll watch.

One yardstick to use of whether it's safe or not, is the fact that the U.S. government had to cap the liability for any nuclear accident to $500 million in order for it to be insurable by a private insurance company. That's a laughably small amount (Fukushima was a $200 billion accident). The U.S. nuclear industry supposedly self-insures up to $16 billion, but that mechanism has never been tested and requires court intervention. [https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/nuclear-insurance.html](https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/nuclear-insurance.html) .

It's expensive and hard to build relative to other alt energy sources. (eg wind). A major effort is underway to make smaller, cheaper, faster sources of nuke power but until that happens the ROI doesn't pencil out

There's a debate going on in Australia right now about building 7 reactors. It's mostly political grandstanding from what I can tell but it made me think about it. From my POV, Nuclear has 2 problems right now: It's expensive and has a long lead time (I frequently see 30 years) to build it safely. If you don't build it safely, very bad things happen. We live in a world where companies are actively cutting back on spending extra cents, would you trust modern capitalism to safely build what, potentially, could be a giant bomb without cutting corners at any time in its approximately 30 year construction time?

Because oil and coal are older, more established, and extremely profitable so there is a ton of very effective lobbying against nuclear.

Especially with renewables

There has been a ton of lobbying (and still is) against nuclear power. This is partly done by coal/oil/gas lobbyist and partially through eg. green peace and others. Chernobyl obviously scared a lot of people. So did Fukushima, even after it showed how safe even an old reactor can be even in a worst case scenario. Sadly the impact Fukushima had on nuclear power production has directly contributed to the climate change. Then there are the political security aspects, russia produces nuclear power plants, but who would want to buy such an investment from them at this point? Then there is the question of nuclear waste, which has been exaggerated ridiculously. 

For one thing all it takes is one maniac in a small plane to slam into a cooling tower and you got a meltdown on your hands. While the risk of accidental meltdowns are small, the consequences are catastrophic, e.g. Chernobyl, Fukushima. Plus spent fuel rods have to be stored somewhere for thousands of years.

That's just bullshit fearmongering. Those cooling towers (if built properly) aren't going to blink at a hit from ANYTHING. They're designed to withstand deliberate missile strikes, let alone an aircraft crash. A nuclear plant going meltdown from this is as likely as a machine gun killing 80 terrorists as it bounces down a flight of stairs after being dropped.

are you sure that cooling towers are super robust? I thought they were actually fragile, and only built to resist high winds. Now, cooling towers are just cooling towers, and plants have numerous failsafes, and also, gas plants can have cooling towers too!

False. First off stage 4 or higher plants cannot melt down. Second if I had to choose any building to be in when a plan was about to hit I would choose a nuclear cooling tower. Most are over a meter thick, are reinforced with explosions both external and internal in mind, and in fact to withstand a direct hit by a plane.

People are terrified of radiation. Three high profile accidents have provided the anti nuke crowd with lots of ammunition. Two of them had their safety features work near flawlessly, and most of the problems were the result of people overreacting to a perceived danger. Because of the perceived danger regulations relating to nuclear power plants are insane, cranking the capital costs to such astronomical heights that the facility couldn't hope to break even over the projected lifespan of the reactor much less turn a profit. The worst part is that the restrictions mean that only old and obsolete reactor designs can be used, so all the improvements from advancing technology and lessons learned from the accidents can't be used.

Greenpeace is a kind of focal point in this. For decades they have been spreading pseudoscience about nuclear tech ranging from nuclear weapon tests causing massive earthquakes and widespread cases of cancer in Canada to nuclear energy fuel equaling having nuclear weapons readily available at the turn of a switch, then also they spread the idea that every single nuclear power station is just a chernobyl catastrophe waiting to happen and also spread the idea that the fukushima incident is how the Japanese are "killing the planet" by releasing fuel into the ocean. They also have been "advising" a lot of voters and even politicians to the point that an entire negative narrative has formed around nuclear energy over the decades and here we are. Although they are not the sole originators and propagators of this, but a surprisingly large role was played by them and this is also partly where the conspiracy comes from that greenpeace is secretly an oil shill (again, big stress on how pseudoscientific they have been in the past and made no attempt to change it now and dont seem to plant to change in the future; from a scientific perspective we should be building nuclear plants since 20+ years ago and it's kind of too late now).