This article is vague on the specifics, but it looks from their website like they're talking about an MSR using a conventional uranium fuel cycle, rather than going the Thorium route like lots of other MSR enthusiasts seem to want to... I wonder why they went that route? Seems like if you're going to go to the effort of developing a new reactor design from scratch, there's not really any reason to leave half of the potential benefits on the table (proliferation resistance, fuel abundance, etc.).
Right, I'm aware, but that still requires uranium mining to have fueled the original reactors to make the waste, so it's not a solution to either proliferation or supply, at least long-term.
The Japanese Nuclear Commission had the following goals set in 2003: " The mean value of acute fatality risk by radiation exposure resultant from an accident of a nuclear installation to individuals of the public, who live in the vicinity of the site boundary of the nuclear installation, should not exceed the probability of about 1x10^6 per year (that is , at least 1 per million years)".
That policy was designed only 8 years ago. Their one in a million-year accident almost occurred about 8 year later (I am not even sure if it is at best a near miss). We are clearly in the Fourth Quadrant there.
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Human beings are not capable of estimating the risks from Nuclear power plant operation. Take from that what you will.
You'd think Taleb would have an immediate intuitive sense of how "once in a million year" accidents fit our narrative biases, but the slow-motion devastation of large areas of the US and the deaths of tens of thousands of people attributable to inhaled fossil fuel pollution don't.
I believe that nuclear power is much safer and less destructive to the environment than mining and burning coal(for example).
But when Tokyo Power sought to build the nuclear plant at Ōkuma I guarantee you they didn't tell people, "this will totally kill fewer people than a coal plant would". They promised absolute safety. The Japanese nuclear regulatory agency didn't promise fewer deaths than the equivalent coal plant. They promised 1 death every million years.
Nuclear power makes huge promises and when it fails to live up to them it tries to change the standard by which it's judged.
I think his point is the continual failure of humans to estimate risks involving complex phenomenon, not specifically about the appropriateness of nuclear power.
Taleb seems to greatly respect empirical evidence as opposed to models and theories. If you presented him with the evidence that fossil fuel power plants kill thousands per year versus the deaths caused by nuclear power, I imagine it would go a long way towards convincing him that nuclear power was better.
1 fatality per million years? What kind of crazy number is that? It's completely impossible to make such an estimate, you'd need at least a hundred thousand years worth of data.
I would be perfectly happy with 1 fatality per hundred years, and that's an estimate we can actually make. (Even one per decade is better than non-nuclear power.)
The article is pretty thin, and starts out by stating that no-one doubts the ability of nuclear power to supply our energy needs more or less indefinitely (I'd copy and paste the exact sentence but I can't — argh). This is a bad start.
MSR does look like a technology worth revisiting, but this article is a puff piece.
The article certainly doesn't state anything new. Fail safes such as the "freeze plug" or the ship to order model or the lack of pressurization are not new. On the flip side though, at least we're seeing this resurgence (in public interest) in nuclear technology whether it be MSRs or other Generation IV+ reactors. Maybe having private companies make significant progress on a tight budget is what it takes to drive further funding from large governmental bodies, just as in the Space industry.
MSR reactors replace such delicate systems with rugged ones: gravity, heat, and the most basic chemical properties of their materials.
So they replace the ultimate fail-safe version with a now ultimately ultimate fail-safe version? Not to mention that of course Fukushima was built to withstand these losses. Oops, that didn't work? How come? It was all so fail-safe and rugged.
Fukushima wasn't prepared for the tsunami. The Onagawa plant had a seawall more than 9m high. It successfully shut down without incident even though it was closer to the epicenter than Fukushima. In fact, families actually took refuge in the plant during the tsunami. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/30/onagawa-tsunami-...
