HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Could you explain your position? I feel like nuclear energy is one of the best options we have available for a reduction in carbon emissions, with very high safety despite public fears: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_...

Or is your opposition more due to the proposed subsidy?

⬐ redis_mlc

> with very high safety

Nope. Both Chernobyl and Fukushima will cost over $1 trillion to clean up, if ever. Can we send the bills to you?

No, actually it's not. None of these can satisfy the energy needs. We have data[1]. The only technology that displaces cole & natural gas power supplies is nuclear (& hydro technically but that's generally tapped out).

To me, Professor MV Ramana in the article raises far more valuable concerns/questions than Greenpeace & he's actually an expert on SMR and nuclear energy policy:

> He says UK SMR's 10-year time-scale for its first plant may prove optimistic. The one constant in the history of the nuclear industry to date is that big new concepts never come in on time and budget, he says.

> He is sceptical[sic] that the factory concept can deliver significant cost savings given the complexity and scale of even a small nuclear plant. Smaller plants will have to meet the same rigorous safety standards as big ones, he points out.

> He says where the concept has been tried elsewhere - in the US and China, for example - there have been long delays and costs have ended up being comparable to large nuclear power stations.

> Finally, he questions whether there will be a market for these plants by the 2030s, when UK SMR says the first will be ready.

> "Ten years from now, the competition will be renewables which are going to be far cheaper with much better storage technology than we have today," says Prof Ramana.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_...

⬐ phaemon

> No, actually it's not. None of these can satisfy the energy needs.

Of course they can, and already do in some countries.

> We have data[1].

Or at least a TED talk. Checking it out...

1:26 "From 36% to 31%": Well, it certainly dropped, but it doesn't look from a quick scan as if that trend is continuing after 2010. Looks like it goes up after 2013. And, indeed if I check the source he used, the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, it has figures now up to 2019, which show we're at 37% so the trend has reversed in the right direction. Also, that talk was given in 2016, so why are the figures only up to 2013? I was able to get last year...

Moving on...no, wait, that graph looked a bit weird. That "arrow" was meant to look like a trend line, but it's actually just hovering above two points. What're the rest of the data for, decoration? That's just two cherry picked points! That isn't statistics, it's join-the-dots.

We're less than 2 minutes in and it's not looking good for the "we have data" video.

2:07: "There's just a lot of poor countries that are still using wood and dung and charcoal as their main source of energy": ironically, these are carbon neutral, but at any rate, these are not the countries that have the highest CO2 emissions, so why are we trying to suggest it's their fault?

2:44: "Barely makes up half": not true anymore; renewables have overtaken nuclear and as mentioned, have reduced the usage of fossil fuels already.

2:50: "Let's take a closer look in the United States." - This seems a bit like talking about how to get to the Superbowl and suggesting we take a closer look at the Cleveland Browns. Would it not be a good idea to look at countries who're actually good at renewables?

3:15: "People think of California as a clean energy and climate leader": Heh, no, I think of countries and states with >80% electricity from renewables as leaders. California doesn't qualify.

3:21: "What about Germany?": Ah, lets move on from Cleveland and talk about the Detroit Lions...Why is it that the nuclear fanboys always want to talk about Germany, rather than the other countries in Europe who have far more renewable energy.

3:21: "and there's really not anybody who's going to tell you that they're going to meet their climate commitments in 2020.":

Narrator: "They met their targets."

3:36: "Solar and wind provide power about 10 to 20 percent of the time": Genuinely baffled by this one. This guy thinks there's only daylight 20% of the time? He thinks that wind turbines are built in areas that only have wind 20% of the time? Is he a complete idiot?

I think I'll stop here. I've just one more point to add: this guy says he's been travelling and researching this himself, yet his actual graphs came from the BP report I mentioned earlier. Why did the data come from an oil company if they compiled it themselves? I get the feeling that the real push for nuclear is simply a stalling tactic being pushed by fossil fuel interests, because they know that if countries simply rolled out wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, tidal etc today, they couldn't possibly compete and they'd be finished.

What do you reckon?

⬐ goatinaboat

there have been long delays and costs have ended up being comparable to large nuclear power stations

Did he mention that the delays and costs are attributable to lobbying by... Greenpeace?

⬐ jka

Thanks for the video reference - I'll check that out.

> No, actually it's not.

Sorry, not sure I follow - which part of my comment were you responding to here?

> To me, Professor MV Ramana in the article raises far more valuable concerns/questions

Yep - there are some fairly blunt conclusions in a recently co-authored publication[1] of theirs regarding SMR prospects for the UK and elsewhere:

"There is every likelihood that, as with the previous nuclear renaissance, SMRs will be still born with few reactors built. This will mean that public money will again have been wasted on nuclear technology, but, as previously, the main cost will be the opportunity costs of the options not pursued and properly funded because resources have been pre-empted by the nuclear sector."

One perspective of many, but worth considering.

[1] - https://sppga.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2018/09/sub2...

Here's a Ted Talk that says the same thing:

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_...

Much of the HN crowd is against nuclear. We had the debate 3 weeks ago when I posted this TED talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_...

You can read past arguments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12777901

Without nuclear power, there's no stopping global warming:

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_...

We squandered the past 3 decades, now we're screwed.

⬐ Recurecur

I was going to post on this topic, so thanks for getting it started!

If the interests vested in CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming) want to be taken seriously, they MUST push for drastically increased funding for advanced nuclear. Designs for advanced nuclear reactors already exist that eliminate the possibility of meltdown, as well as the need for water cooling. Such reactors would be perfect for coal plant replacement, which is the main necessity for power generation.

The grid needs a large percentage of electricity to be reliable, unlike wind and solar. We also need a source for the rapidly increasing power needs of the world. Safe, clean nuclear power is the answer, and is also the best solution in terms of environmental footprint. Yes, better than solar. (Solar is great when the real estate is "free", in other words rooftop solar and solar buildings.)

One innovative company (of many) working on this is Thorcon Power. Thorcon's concept is to site the reactors 30 meters underground for extra security and safety. It believes it can deliver electricity at three to five cents per KWH in today's dollars.

http://thorconpower.com/

⬐ _ph_

Nuclear certainly keeps the CO2 emissions down. France has a pretty low CO2 footprint based on 80+% nuclear electric power. However, nuclear is not only controversial, but going forward, expensive. For new installations, wind and solar installations are cost competitive if not even cheaper, with little environmental or economic risks attached.

⬐ melling

You made that up, right? The current project is that solar will be cheaper than nuclear by 2025.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/11/solar-an...

⬐ _ph_

I said cost competitive, not that they are cheaper by the last cent today. Onshore wind is cheaper, solar currently in the same ballpark. But the cost of Hinkley is going to raise during its life time, which solar keeps getting cheaper. And is the long time storage cost of the waste and the dismantling of the plant already priced into the cost of Hinkley?

⬐ None

None

⬐ melling

You haven't provide a citation in either case.

⬐ _ph_

I have in other subtrees of the discussion. Hinkley C is guaranteed about 100 €/MWh with raising fees according to inflation. This is roughly the same cost as offshore wind, onshore wind in Germany is around 60€/MWh, solar 100-120€ MWh, there is a solar project in Dubai which promises to be better than 30€/MWh.

Here are some numbers given (in $, not €): https://www.neueenergie.net/wirtschaft/markt/wind-schlaegt-k...

⬐ briandear

Little environmental risks attached?

6000 birds are killed each year at one solar facility:

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-solar-bird-dea...

Nuclear can be done correctly as France has proven. How many major nuclear disasters have their been? Japan is the most recent, but are nuclear disasters really a major threat compared to covering large swatches of land with solar panels or worse, windmills?

I pose that as an honest question: what's the cost benefit of nuclear vs. highly inefficient solar or wind?

What's the environmental cost of producing massive batteries to store solar or wind energy?

There are huge unintended consequences that ought to be explored.

⬐ idlewords

I'm afraid the birds are just going to have to evolve their way out of this one.

⬐ _ph_

How many birds are killed by house cats and cars every year? Of course one needs to keep investigating how to make windmills more bird-friendly. The solar plant which killed birds is a solarthermal one which concentrates the sunlight via mirrors. Photovoltaic plants do not kill birds. France has a good history of running their plants, but they do get older. So the risk is constantly raising. I am living in Bavaria, Germany. Here is is still not considered entirely safe to eat mushrooms and wild boar from the forests, as they still carry contamination from the Chernobyl incident, and are expected to do so for the next decades. And Chernobyl is about 1000 km away from here.

⬐ hacker42

> For new installations, wind and solar installations are cost competitive if not even cheaper, with little environmental or economic risks attached.

Citation needed.

⬐ Recurecur

Exactly. If subsidies are removed from the equation, solar in particular is quite a bit more expensive. Wind and solar also lack the 24/7 reliability of nuclear.

⬐ _ph_

No, solar is about 100€/MWh without subsidies. Indeed, the one big problem remaining with wind and solar is constant supply over the day. But the larger the connected grids are, the better this balances out. While a nuclear power plant delivers a constant output 24/7 (this is also not ideal as we are lacking consumption in the late evening and night, thats why Belgium put lights onto their highways), nuclear power plants regularly get pulled of the grid entirely, if there is a technical problem. A new one should of course have less downtimes than an older one, but one needs to plan in a certain amount of replacement capacity.

⬐ _ph_

The wikipedia article about Hinkley talks about the costs and guaranteed prices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... I am pretty sure, that does not even include the long term cost for the nuclear waste. The roughly 100€/MWh brings it into line with offshore wind, which is about twice as expensive as onshore wind, but more steady and reliable. Solar is roughly in the same ballpark too in middle Europe, in Dubai a new solar plant is being built which promises to be less than $30/MWh.

⬐ KaiserPro

Hinkley point is an aberration. its doesn't make any buisness or strategic sense for the UK.

Its double the cost of grid power, in perpetuity, in exchange for some vague handwaving that the Chinese might try out some of their experimental reactors on british soil. Or perhaps a "free trade deal" which is equally moronic for UK manufacturing.

⬐ _ph_

Is there any good cost estimate, what the final electricity price produced by the Olkiluoto reactor is going to be, with its construction cost ballooning from 3 to 8 billion pounds?

⬐ KaiserPro

There is a massive "but" at the end of that.

For example: most grids in the western world rely on constant/predictable supplies of power.

Nuclear/coal/gas/hydro provide a constant level of electricity with a clear spinup/spindown time.

That being said, in hot countries solar is a good option, as when its hot, its generally sunny which means the aircon demand can be serviced well.

But, thats assuming that the sun and the wind are constant.

They are not, so you have to store that energy somehow. Grid scale batteries are just not really feasible yet, unless you happen to live in wales[1] or scotland[2].

However they now are only really there to overcome British tea breaks(thats a bit unfair). But they are the product of a nationalised energy infrastructure that thought about doing things properly. (now its just be massive diesel gennies to deal with the comedically narrow line between blackout and working grid)

So actually the problem of generating electricity from natural sources is pretty much solved (barring costs) The biggest barrier is storing electricty for a stable grid.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station [2]http://www.scottishpower.com/pages/cruachan_power_station.as...

⬐ diafygi

The investment firm Lazard has a nice report[1] on comparing U.S. energy costs by source. Here's the costs in the U.S. (without counting subsidies):

    * Wind:          $  32/MWh
    * Solar:         $  43/MWh
    * Natural Gas:   $  52/MWh
    * Coal:          $  65/MWh
    * Geothermal:    $  82/MWh
    * Biomass:       $  82/MWh
    * Nuclear:       $  97/MWh
    * Solar+Storage: $ 119/MWh
    * Diesel:        $ 212/MWh

So wind and solar are currently the cheapest, but you can only get to about 50% penetration with those without storage[2]. The rest has to be "dispatchable".

[1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-...

[2]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vsmith/docs/renewables_sgc...

⬐ _ph_

As a consequence of the Chernobyl incident, parts of western Europe are still contaminated. For example, it is still not entirely safe to eat mushrooms or wild boar from Bavaria. And that is not going to change in my life time. About a 1000km away from Chernobyl. I am a physicist and certainly do not have irrational fears of nuclear energy. But the risks and uses of nuclear have to be carefully considered. Looking at the prices paid for modern reactors being built right now, they seem to be quite more expensive than wind and solar installations.

⬐ digi_owl

Yep. Some sheep farmers in Norway still have to monitor and medicate their herds because of the accident...

⬐ hiddenkrypt

As a consequence of the Centralia incident[1], a portion of Pennsylvania, USA has been rendered practically uninhabitable since 1963. The fire may continue burning for up to two hundred and fifty years. It is not the only persistent coal mine fire in that state, let alone worldwide.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

I do not mean to diminish the tragedy of the Chernobyl incident or the dangers of nuclear accidents, but to provide context. Even ignoring the energy balance which show nuclear as being safer per KWH than any other tech (including wind and solar), even including the disasters of fukushima and chernobyl, Nuclear has been safer and less damaging to the environment than coal.

Wind and solar are great, I'd love to see more use and developments there. They can't compete with the energy density of coal, let alone atomics.

⬐ creshal

Nuclear's inability to be both cheap and reliable is hurting it more. Once you add up all the costs for decommissioning old power plants and nuclear repositories (usually paid by the state, not the company owning the power plant), it becomes really uneconomical. Even compared to solar, nowadays.

⬐ witty_username

How is nuclear not reliable? There's no dependence on other countries for fuel and no need for the sun or wind to be there.

⬐ deelowe

The op said CHEAP and RELIABLE. They kind of have to be reliable and as a result are very expensive.

⬐ dogma1138

There have been far fewer accidents involving nuclear plants than fossil fuels, and even with those disasters the environmental impact is considerably less severe than running fossil fuel plants.

The problem is that radiation is scary, no one cries about cancer rates and other stuff when you live 20 miles downwind from a coal power plant, but anytime there is even a slightly elevated radiation everyone freaks out.

⬐ pents90

Some of the worst data presentation offenses are being committed in this talk, including graphs with misleading axes, trend lines derived from too few data points, and no acknowledgement of exponential trends, such as solar energy's adoption.

⬐ M_Grey

Until relatively recently, nuclear was the clear smart option over burning coal. The people who hitched to that are often having difficulties accepting how profoundly and rapidly the situation is changing.

⬐ sliverstorm

Or maybe we can apply some derivative of Hanlon's Razor- that is, if the situation is changing that profoundly & rapidly, maybe it's just incredibly difficult to always have the latest data & insightful comparisons.

⬐ M_Grey

I would file that under, "difficulties".

⬐ sliverstorm

"Difficulties accepting" seems rather different from the practical difficulty of closely following a fast-moving target.

⬐ berntb

Solar can certainly solve the energy problems for many countries, given that cheaper energy storage really is created. But not for e.g. northern Europe. There just is too little sun, especially in the winter.

Also, it seems transports will be radically electrified the coming two decades, which will strongly increase the demand for electricity.

I have no problems with environmentalists, my problem is that so many of them rather burn oil than build nuclear plants.

⬐ skrause

> But not for e.g. northern Europe. There just is too little sun, especially in the winter.

Norway is already 99% on renewable energy because of hydropower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Norway

There's also plenty of wind. Solar is not your only option.

⬐ paulmd

Solving energy storage on that level is a non-trivial task. People don't understand just how energy-dense liquid and solid fuels are, but you essentially need geological-scale solutions in order to replace them (pumped-storage hydro or compressed-air in deep caverns). Those require specific geological formations and in the case of pumped-storage hydro has a pretty negative environmental footprint. You take a mountain range and you flood it and drain it on a daily basis, anything that used to be there is now underwater half the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

There is about 740 TWh of pumped-storage capacity available worldwide. If we gave every single US household a Tesla Powerwall (6.4 KWh) it would add up to 0.7936 TWh of capacity. If we keep the US average of 2.55 people per household and scale that up to the 7.4 billion people worldwide (2.89 billion households) that's still only 18.49 TWh. One per person worldwide, 44.8 TWh. Maybe double that if we give every person on the planet an electric car that's tied into the grid too.

So if we gave every person a Powerwall, that's 6% of the presently extant pumped-storage capacity. And it's certainly not like we've made any sort of systematic attempt to fully exploit pumped storage, if we are doing worldwide solutions then we can go a lot farther on the other side of the equation too.

Again, people vastly underestimate just how great liquid fuels are at storing energy in comparison to how shitty batteries are. We're talking about liquid fuels having more than 100x the energy density of a lithium-ion battery here. Batteries are convenient from a design perspective but they are wildly inefficient from a density perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

If anything, the advent of cheap clean electricity from nuclear should shift us toward synthetic liquid fuels for the energy density involved. There's nothing stopping you from pulling carbon out of the air and synthesizing it back into a long-chain hydrocarbon. It's also significantly cleaner than fossil-derived fuel.

The Fischer-Tropsch process has been around for a century and there's lots of neat modern tweaks to it. It just takes a lot of energy (more than you get out of it obviously) but if we have lots of nuclear power then why not use it as a dense energy-store over batteries? It saves us a heck of a lot of rebuilding infrastructure too.

⬐ exDM69

Does anyone know of a reliable source for comparison of the environmental, cost and health effects of different forms of energy? I've had a hard time finding a good source that isn't politically motivated and biased.

It's very difficult to evaluate e.g. wind turbines (poor output) and photovoltaics (exotic raw materials) against nuclear with the information I've found.

⬐ iaw

Having worked in a related part of the electricity industry: not as far as I know. As far as I can tell everyone has an agenda.

I am in favor of fission as a primary energy resource but there's no way to have an honest comparative conversation because everyone is jockeying for the upperhand.

⬐ exDM69

My thoughts exactly.

I'm under the impression that e.g. wind power should not be built at all for electricity production (output is just too little) but all the subsidies it enjoys makes it a worthwhile business. Considering whether this is true is difficult because the facts are intentionally obscured and for example the wind power capacity is often at some nominal wind speed which is often a lot more than the average at the location. In my home country, a 1MW wind turbine was built but the nominal output is at 13 m/s while the average wind speed is around 6 m/s, yielding about an eighth of the nominal power (proportional to the speed cubed).

The same is true for photovoltaics as the raw materials need a huge volume of earth to be mined for a miniscule amount of material.

Nuclear isn't any different, it's hard to get facts from uranium mining and enrichment, especially given its military value and the surrounding secrecy.

For this reason, I usually refrain from any energy policy discussion. I can't have an opinion if I can't have the facts. Without facts, these discussions often devolve into emotional shouting contests.

⬐ iaw

From what I've eked out over the years:

- Wind is not that good of an energy source but in some areas can provide offsetting capacity. Built at any scale wind becomes useless due to numerous factors, especially predicting production and storage.

- Solar in some very specific areas makes perfect sense (Mexica, Southern US, etc) but in most places will never be economic. While a little more predictable than wind it's still not ideal and suffers from similar storage problems. At scale it does serious damage to the environment (Mojave desert installation is a good example...)

- Hydro & Geothermals are phenomenal in the few areas where they exist (e.g. Canada).

- Coal is pretty bad both for the miners pulling it out of the ground and the environment we burn it into. It's an economic powerhouse and a ton of capacity exists so it's going to be hard to get away from.

- Gas Turbines are horribly inefficient but will probably become more and more common as the political will to solve the underlying problems is lacking and they are the only feasible stopgap.

- Nuclear Fission is between a rock and a hard place. On one side, too much regulation is preventing active development. On the other side, without sufficient regulation the companies will play fast and loose with a seriously dangerous substance. Deepwater horizon can give you an idea of how much buck-shifting could occur. Sadly, fission is the only resource that is currently practical and won't exacerbate an already tenuous climate.

Nuclear Fusion is the holy grail of power generation but there are serious engineering challenges behind it. We are as far from economically viable controlled fusion now as we were from the moon in mid-1962 but there's no JFK swinging the force of a nation-state behind the technology making it's likelihood of realization low.

In short, we're screwed.

⬐ exDM69

This is pretty much what I think but I'm looking for citable source

⬐ iaw

If you find it do let me know.

⬐ gioele

Redutio ad bombarolum:

Somebody detonates a bomb or throws a plane into a nuclear power plant => possible irreparable ecological disaster.

Somebody detonates a bomb or throws a plane into a solar plant => a few broken glasses to clean up.

You choose.

More seriously, nuclear power is the future of clean energy. But (future) nuclear fusion, not (current) nuclear fission.

⬐ vonmoltke

Without quantifying "possible" and "irreparable" this is nothing but fearmongering. What would it take to accidentally or intentionally breach the containment vault on a reactor? What are the chances of that happening? Ignoring paranoid overreactions, what is the worst ecological damage that could be done? How is it "irreparable"?

⬐ Cpoll

Someone runs coal and gas plants for several decades => Possible irreparable ecolo- Whoops, too late.

⬐ witty_username

> Somebody detonates a bomb or throws a plane into a nuclear power plant => possible irreparable ecological disaster.

https://www.google.com/search?q=plane+crashing+into+nuclear+...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7eI4vvlupY

Sounds like reactors can manage a plane crashing into them (and so perhaps a bomb also).

⬐ ageofwant

possible irreparable ecological disaster ? Have a look at Chernobyl, its a wildlife haven. Yes there are ecological damage but the fact that humans don't go near it (apart from the still operating other reactor buildings) more than makes up for that.

Chernobyl was the worst nuclear accident ever, and its a paradise compared to say, Manhattan Island.

⬐ Kenji

Actually, as it stands, modern nuclear power plants should withstand such a plane attack.

⬐ whamlastxmas

Modern nuclear power plants would not be damaged to the point of endangering anyone outside the plant if you flew a plane into it. You would need military grade missiles/artillery to damage a nuclear plant more than a plane. The plants are ridiculously overbuilt. If you wanted to fly a plane into a target to make a statement, a nuclear plant would be the dumbest choice unless you were hired by the oil and coal industries.

⬐ None

None

⬐ sounds

Thank you for mentioning fusion. My money is on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell#Going_public

I realize it does not appear nearly as promising as the many other fusion research programs. Having many competing fusion research programs is a good thing!

⬐ default_user

You may be joking, but seriously the possible irreparable damage is indeed an argument for me that gets insufficiently addressed by the pro nuclear people.

Off course, more people die because of coal power plants and off course the net loss of land due to global warming is bigger compared to nuclear due to rising sea levels. But you can still go to those flooded places (albeit in a diving suite) and not get cancer... This is not the case for the Chernobyl area or Fukushima. This place is lost and cannot be used by humans for a long time. This cannot not happen when using coal power plants.

Take a small country like Switzerland. We cannot afford to lose any land. You can do something about the death of people in the coal mining industry and you can also do something to reduce the atmospheric CO2. But once a nuclear accident happens the land is lost and nothing can be done about it.

And this point is never addressed properly. I don't care about the probability, I care about the possibility.

⬐ Tharre

"you can also do something to reduce the atmospheric CO2"

Would you mind sharing this 'something' that magically makes CO2 disappear? Because unless you're suggesting to stop using cars and electricity, there'd be a lot of people interested in that method to stop climate change.

"Take a small country like Switzerland. We cannot afford to lose any land."

Meaning since Switzerland can't afford to lose land, other countries have to. But then why not just built nuclear power plants outside of Switzerland and import power instead?

"I don't care about the probability, I care about the possibility."

No, you always care about the probability. There is a possibility that tomorrow a big asteroid crashes into Earth and extinguishes all humans. But the possibility alone doesn't justify the trillions that would be required to mitigate that risk.

⬐ pitaj

You can use excess power from nuke plants at night to power carbon scrubbers and store that CO2 in underground caverns or even convert it into fuel.

⬐ witty_username

> I don't care about the probability, I care about the possibility.

Anything could happen. All the electrons in the atoms of your body could end up in Mars or all the gas in your room escapes out asphyxiating you. But that's a very very low probability. Probability matters, not the possibility.

⬐ berntb

I don't understand why environmentalists have problems with forced natural reserves like Chernobyl and Fukushima?

But maybe I should be happy -- if they had a clue, then they might start building dirty bomb together with the islamists. :-)

⬐ sliverstorm

Hah, there's a funny thought. You're right though, for every life form other than humans, the meltdown in Chernobyl has had happy results.

For them, exposure to radiation poisoning is better than exposure to humans.

⬐ nimmer

Not to mention that Chernobyl and Fukushima are far from the worst case scenario.

An active power plant or a nuclear waste storage facility being destroyed (e.g. as an act of war) and dispersing a large amount of fuel/waste in the environment would be orders of magnitude worse.

⬐ hiddenkrypt

> This is not the case for the Chernobyl area or Fukushima. This place is lost and cannot be used by humans for a long time. This cannot not happen when using coal power plants.

Wrong.

The Centralia Mine fire has been burning since 1963.[1] The area of the mine is extremely dangerous, causing the city above to be seized by eminent domain and condemned. Poisonous, dangerously heated gases erupt from the ground at random. Chernobyl is reaching the point where the radiation levels are low enough for tourism. Centralia's mine fire will continue burning for up to 250 years. The released gasses will continue to contribute to atmospheric CO2 that entire time. The radiological components of coal combustion (radium gas being one) will continue to be released. It's already a known fact that coal power plants cause more radiation in the cities around them than nuclear plants do.

This is not the only mine fire in the state of Pennsylvania[2], let alone the only such site in the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Run_mine_fire

Say what you want about nuclear. Coal is far worse.

⬐ default_user

Thank you, I did not know that.

Just to clarify, I'm not for coal either. It's just an issue that is never properly discussed in mainstream debates.

⬐ closeparen

Everyone is "not for coal either" but when you strongly oppose nuclear power and weakly oppose coal power, you are fighting for more coal power.

⬐ szemet

According to the article 150 people die / trillionWh due to wind power. According to wikipedia 269 birds die / trillionWh due to wind power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p...

So the death rate for birds is nearly the same that for people? Seems strange. We can protect clueless birds better from the turbines, than the intelligent and educated working people up there??? Or something is wrong with either of the estimations...

⬐ szemet

Here they calculate deaths due to maintanence: and it is around 0.02 death / Million MWh (= trillion), which is far far far from 150 deaths. So there may be some kind of iron mining fallacy here to, that I mentioned in my earlier comment... http://dailysignal.com/2010/06/26/wind-power-is-more-dangero...

⬐ ekun

I assume that the human deaths are related to the toxicity involved with mining rare earth metals which are part of the magnets in the turbines.

⬐ szemet

Then they have to estimate how big is the market effect of the turbines on mining. It is very very hard, wonder can it be done well enough...

For example: It may even happen (logically possible at least) that stopping building turbines brings down the price but not the demand (others will buy it anyway), and the net effect will be that due to lower prices miners close safer but more expensive mines and reopens cheaper but more dangerous mines.

Once, I've read an estimation where they even calculated deaths due to iron mining, into wind energy deaths!!! They simply added the deaths that may occur mining the needed amount of iron.... Big big mistake, according to what I wrote earlier. Wing turbines hardly have that direct market effect on iron miners life. And because that study (I can't find it now) was sponsored by nuclear power organizations - guess the mistake was intentional - so it was not a "mistake" more like a disgusting ethical crime...

⬐ Tharre

You should actually read the wikipedia article. The 269 birds / TWh number stems from the lower estimation that between 20,000 and 573,000 birds per year are killed from wind turbines in the US.

⬐ bjelkeman-again

A tangent. If we worry about bird deaths there are more important factors to consider. https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_64.shtml

⬐ vg2001

In 20years we will have fusion. Then everything solved. It's what I learned when I was a child in the 1960s

⬐ sqeaky

Just like 20 years ago fusion was only 15 years out.

⬐ pasbesoin

It's fear of the humans engineering, managing, and politicking it.

Those humans haven't changed, and they don't seem to show much propensity for changing.

⬐ libeclipse

The UK green party has some very good policies overall, but one pitfall is that they're heavily against nuclear fission.

I was given the chance last year to question one of their MPs about their stance on nuclear fusion and the general gist of the response was that they didn't think that it would succeed but they're "not against research in the field".

⬐ throwaway98237

Nuclear power is the problem of the "Black Swan" embodied.

⬐ slifin

The way nuclear is always pushed like this on Reddit and Hacker News makes me wonder if there is a PR company behind these posts

If they are, are they acting in our collective interests? I frankly don't even know

My gut feeling is I'd rather have wind solar hydro or something green on my door step

⬐ lmm

You can check people's post history. The tone doesn't seem very PR-company-ey to me, shrug.

Nuclear is greener by most reasonable measures. Wind and solar don't scale (and kill people during installation/maintenance, and in the case of solar require a lot of environmentally-damaging mining); hydro renders larger areas uninhabitable during business-as-usual than nuclear does in disaster scenarios, and leads to many more deaths in proportion to the energy produced.

⬐ ageofwant

Do not believe everything you think, your "gut" is about as trustworthy a source of data as any other organ. Have you considered that this really is just reality as it is ?

⬐ sliverstorm

The audience of these sites are generally liberal (aka green), interested in technology, and young (not adults in the Cold War era, where a lot of the fear of nuclear originated). It doesn't seem odd to me that there would be interest in nuclear.

⬐ closeparen

>My gut feeling is I'd rather have wind solar hydro or something green on my door step

So would approximately everyone, but right now a green-power-only world would mean crushing energy scarcity and spiking prices. For the time being, we have to let through coal, natural gas, or nuclear, and our argument is that nuclear is far and away the least bad option of those three.

Wanting energy sources that have minimal environmental impact and no risk of large environmental impact is great, but you have to hold that position as strongly against coal as you do against nuclear or we just get more coal, which is a great deal worse.

⬐ witty_username

Nuclear power is green.

⬐ digi_owl

> The way nuclear is always pushed like this on Reddit and Hacker News makes me wonder if there is a PR company behind these posts

Damn hard to tell.

⬐ dandelion_lover

The push is driven by the people who do not believe their "gut feeling", but are trying to understand the depth of the problem, me included.

⬐ staticvar

No one will ever trust corporations or governments to operate a nuclear power plant safely. Imagine if Enron had been managing a nuclear power plant. They would have blown it up way before it came out that they were frauds and crooks.

⬐ petre

This guy is right in many ways, but also check out other TED talks from actual scientists, or at least engineers:

Kirk Sorensen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw

Sunniva Rose https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTKl5X72NIc

Srikumar Banerjee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGhEdcwXxdE

⬐ sharemywin

Interesting article about cyber attacks and proliferation

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724697

⬐ jlebrech

the future of nuclear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY

⬐ woliveirajr

If I understood it correctly, one big problem is that some "clean" energy like solar and wind don't accumulate, i.e., it must be used as it is produced, and that doesn't scale well with spikes in consume during the night and so on.

In that sense, using electric cars as batteries seems interesting. They would charge during the day and discharge during the night. The fact that they move around is a bonus :)

⬐ IMTDb

Electrical energy does not accumulate: it's a movement of electrons, and we can't "store" a movement. The best we can do to "store electricity" (note the quote) is to create a system that can easily produce this movement of electrons as needed. Here are two examples :

- A chemical reaction that creates a movement of electric charges during the reaction. This is how your regular batteries work. Rechargeable batteries like the one found is Tesla cars, your laptop, ... use a chemical reaction that can be "rewinded" if an opposite movement of electrons is forced by an external system. - A big hole in the ground is divided in two parts with dam that is fully closed. Both parts are half full of water. To recharge the "battery", the water of the left part of the hole is pumped in the right part of the hole using electrical power. When electrical power is needed, the dam is open, and water is forced by gravity from the right part of the hole to the left part. the water passes through a turbine that generates power that can be injected into the grid.

There are dozens of ways to create batteries like these, but none are actually storing electrical power.

Please also note that there are no perfect batteries : you always use more energy to recharge the battery than you get when using it.

⬐ c22

This is needlessly pedantic. As you implied we can't "store" any type of energy, electric or otherwise, but this is commonly accepted terminology for creating and exploiting an energy potential. I can't "store" mp3s on my iPod either, but no one is confused or deceived by the terminology.

⬐ IMTDb

The original comment I am replying to seems to oppose clean energy that don't accumulate VS nuclear power which would accumulate to be used later. At least that's how I understood it.

I just wanted to point out that there is no difference there between nuclear and solar/wind.

⬐ dogma1138

>In that sense, using electric cars as batteries seems interesting.

No, it really does not seem interesting, it seems like a terrible idea up there with solar freaking roadways.

Car batteries have a completely different profile than long term storage batteries.

Different voltage, charge and discharge cycles and drain and output attenuation.

While Tesla does sell a "power wall" it has nothing to do with the car batteries they use, it's a completely different beast and even that is not optimised that well compared to dedicated household level battery storage.

>They would charge during the day and discharge during the night.

Nighttime electrical use is when it's at it's lowest, not to mention that why would you want your car to be discharging at night? You need to drive it in the morning, and if you want to save power you want to charge it at night not to add to the day time use so you want a full battery in the morning.

>The fact that they move around is a bonus :)

A bonus for what? having a system that is unpredictable/unreliable because the location, availability and density of your storage changes constantly?

⬐ ageofwant

Long term storage ? Since when is 12h drain/fill cycles "long term". The Tesla power wall is functionally identical to its car batteries, using the same Li ion battery tech. Optimisation is a matter of power profile programming, modern converters are very capable.

What makes this tech more interesting is the fact that you could buy cheap electricity from the garage you park you car during the day (the one with the massive solar roof, close to cheap to maintain central transmission lines). A million grid-connected batteries represents a very resilient power system with interesting real-time energy markets on top.

It is very interesting indeed.

⬐ digi_owl

I found Adam Curtis' A is for Atom quite interesting regarding this.

Apparently at least the US reactors were essentially scaled up military submarine reactors.

⬐ paulmd

Yep, and of course you have very different design goals for a submarine than you would have in a fixed installation (long time between refuelings, compactness, etc). They're also based on designs which were intended to breed plutonium.

There's a lot which we could improve on if we were doing a clean-slate redesign of our nuclear power infrastructure with an eye towards power generation rather than military purposes.

Unfortunately it's very difficult to realize those reforms with the rampant NIMBYism surrounding nuclear power. We can't even build plants that use upgraded versions of existing technology let alone plants that are running on novel technologies. They sometimes get pilot plants but they never make it out of the prototype stage.

⬐ vg2001

In 20years we will have fusion. Then everything solved. That's what I learned when I was a child in the 1960s. It a truth renewed every year. We may need gen IV fission for one reason, and one reason only: to get rid/at least reduce nuc waste and weapon plutonium. Lets get that shit off the planet, its as bad as CO2

⬐ nailer

> In 20years we will have fusion. Then everything solved. That's what I learned when I was a child in the 1960s.

This is fascinating. I was an 80's kid, and we learnt in primary school that by the year 2000, major cities will be underwater due to the greenhouse effect from CO2 emissions. Not that climate change isn't still a threat: it's just that we seem to forget the hype the media often builds up around legitimate concepts.

⬐ Klasiaster

And where does the uranium come from…? Nobody cares about the enviornmental and health issues in Niger etc.

⬐ reacweb

The exploitation of uranium reduces the amount of radioactive materials in Niger (tongue in cheek).

⬐ paulmd

Where does the lithium or neodymium come from? Those have to be mined too.

> The Chinese Society of Rare Earths estimated that the refinement of one ton of rare earth metals results in 75 cubic meters of acidic wastewater and one ton of radioactive residue. The 1998 leak of hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive wastewater into a nearby lake was a contributing factor to Molycorp’s shutdown in 2002.

http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/09/19/rare-earth-metals-wi...

And with those materials (and especially with coal) we're talking about entirely different scales of material. A couple dozen tonnes of uranium will run a reactor for a year. You need millions of tonnes of coal to produce an equivalent amount of power.

As for where, the interesting thing about uranium is that it's pretty much everywhere. Nobody really prospects for it because it's not commercially valuable. Let's say you go prospecting, and you find a big deposit, then you spend a bunch of money starting up a mining operation. Who's going to buy mass quantities of your uranium? What do you do with it? Beyond nuclear activity and a few things that need super-dense weights for balance, nobody uses it for anything. Why would you even bother prospecting for it?

Canada actually has larger feasibly-recoverable uranium reserves than Niger does. Russia has more than Canada. Australia has more than four times as much as Niger. The US has about half as much. And because it's not really something people go looking for, it's quite likely that there are other large deposits that nobody has found yet.

http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-largest-uranium-reser...

This also has some interesting implications for the cost of nuclear fuel. Fuel costs are essentially rounding errors in the total cost of operating a nuclear power plant (14% including refining). This means that you can withstand massive flunctuations in fuel costs with very little impact on energy prices.

There's actually a huge amount of uranium diluted in seawater. It currently costs twice as much to extract it as it does for terrestrial deposits, but that's a massive quantity if we needed it. About 4 billion tons total (vs 1.7 million tons of known deposits in Australia). And as you extract it, it'll leach from deep-sea rocks which contain about 100 trillion tons total.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-se...

⬐ ageofwant

Recovered from tailing of existing precious metal mines. An its a differential measurement, not absolute, compare it against the damage being done by coal and oil mining.

⬐ None

None

⬐ DannyB2

On the safety issue.

It's not that I don't trust the technology. It's that I don't trust the people in charge of safety. It doesn't happen over night. But it is a gradual cost cutting which leads to corner cutting. It is slow, inevitable and inexorable.

⬐ None

None

⬐ ilurkedhere

Thorium based reactors, anyone?

⬐ known

Cost of electricity by source.

1. Natural gas

2. Hydro

3. Coal

4. Nuclear

5. Solar

6. Wind

⬐ whamlastxmas

In terms of direct cost to consumer, maybe. This is ignoring literally all externalities and loss of life due to pollution by coal or the tremendous environmental damage of hydro/coal.

⬐ legulere

Nuclear power has three big issues:

- Costs: In recent years it has become prohibitively expensive in the west to build nuclear reactors. Hinkley point C in the UK will have higher cost per MWh than wind or even photovoltaics.

- Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former salt mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not nothing at all.

- Security and safety: They're centralized infrastructure, attacking them has catastrophic consequences, unknown unknows like in Fukushima and human errors like in Chernobyl do happen and lead to catastrophes.

⬐ helper

Waste is a much bigger problem in the US than it is in other countries because fuel reprocessing is prohibited in the US. About 20% of the spent fuel is plutonium created from neutron activation of uranium 238. Another ~65% is stable fission products. The amount of dangerous materials is a lot smaller than what the US currently insists on burying.

The US has held the no reprocessing position since 1977 when Jimmy Carter put a stop to it. Carter was worried about nuclear weapons proliferation, and believed that stopping spent fuel processing would help with that by reducing the amount of available plutonium. It seems that he hoped other countries would follow the US' example, but everyone else in the world went on processing and the US now has a big nuclear waste storage problem.

⬐ geezerjay

> - Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former salt mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not nothing at all.

In addition, storing nuclear waste costs money. A lot of money. Nuclear proponents exchange 60 years of energy for thousands of year of baby-sitting nuclear waste, which costs a lot.

⬐ Sumaso

Do you have any source for that, or is it just something you know?

⬐ geezerjay

> Do you have any source for that, or is it just something you know?

If you really had any interest in the subject, you would've googled it by now. Open up google and type "radioactive waste storage cost" if you really have any interest in the subject.

⬐ subtenante

> Cost

I'm interested in seeing data backing this. It is taking real wind turbines/PV panels lifetime and real production? Nuclear reactors have a lifetime of 60 years, wind turbines/PV panels less than that.

> Security

Some GenIV reactor designs also should be helping with that.

⬐ legulere

Hinkley point C has a guaranteed strike price of £92.50/MWh + inflation [1]. That is 10.223 Eurocent per kWh, without any inflation adjustment yet and with the recent fall of the Pound compared to the Euro. The last time free standing photovoltaic installations got a fixed price in Germany it was 8.55 Eurocent per kWh in August 2015 [2]

Gen IV reactors certainly have some better traits compared with conventional nuclear power, however they might not be good enough, are far off and lots of problems might only be detected when you actually put them into use (like it happened with the THTR-300).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... [2]: https://www.solarwirtschaft.de/fileadmin/media/pdf/Verguetun...

⬐ kalleboo

Also is it taking the nuclear reactor's real lifetime into account? Our current crop of reactors were only planned to run for 40 years but their lifetimes keep getting get extended (one article I found said that they expect some existing reactors to run for 80 years)

Edit: does it also take into account the massive investments into grid storage and smart grid upgrades that are going to be needed for solar/wind-based grids to handle the volatility?

⬐ petre

> I'm interested in seeing data backing this.

Also check out capacity factors for different types of power plants. Nuclear and geothermal plants are operated as base load plants and have among the highest capacity factors. Solar photovoltaic is basically just sitting around, yet it's still useful as a distributed grid-interactive power source (on your roof for example).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor

⬐ abefetterman

There's a really great interactive nuclear energy cost calculator produced by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: http://thebulletin.org/nuclear-fuel-cycle-cost-calculator

⬐ M_Grey

It depends... pebble beds were supposed to be the future, then it turned out the fuel spheres were unworkable in a number of ways.

⬐ subtenante

There are other designs. Molten salts for instances, still promising.

⬐ M_Grey

Sure, or a lead-bismuth eutectic, but there are always more issues to be solved, and the maintenance costs and risks are through the roof.

⬐ subtenante

Sure, it does not cost much to say that. Cost and risks are a relative thing, and 'through the roof' is subjective. You have to compare with the other possibilities. No energy is clean. With PV, the cost of treatment of wastes (silicon tetrachoride for instance[1]) and the risks associated with their pollution if not treated are also a problem, especially if we want to make PV substantially more used than it is now in proportion.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03...

⬐ M_Grey

Comparing the nature of industrial waste such as that produced in the production of PV panels, and nuclear waste which is a security, environmental, and political nightmare is unfair and a bit dishonest.

⬐ subtenante

I'm glad I encountered a honesty oracle!

⬐ epistasis

I really like Lazard's summaries of LCOE (levelized cost of energy), which includes the cost throughout the lifetime of a generation source:

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

They also have a separate analysis for the cost of energy storage by various means, which is also awesome.

Given the long lifetime of nuclear plants, the huge upfront costs for a single project, and the rapidly plunging costs for renewables and storage, nuclear seems like a risky financial proposition, personally, and I think most utilities and investors appear to agree. I think that by 2030, PV solar and storage will be cheaper than nuclear, as well as being far more dispatchable and decentralized.

I wish we had built a lot more back in the 80s, as that would have cut off so much of our emissions over the past 30 years.

⬐ neaden

I agree, there was a window when building lots of Nuclear reactors would have been a good idea and it's a shame that we didn't take advantage of it. But with the rapid fall in solar I think that window has closed.

⬐ ageofwant

And all three those "issues" are FUD:

> Cost

This follows directly from unfounded fear from the next two reasons. If coal, that causes 7 000 000 deaths/year is appropriately and proportional regulated what would it cost ?

> Waste

What waste ? The small university library sized cube of waste that simply sits there doing nothing ? Where do you want that, in the air you breathe as waste from coal plants, or under a few meters of topsoil beneath a park somewhere.

> Security and safety

Zero lives were lost due to radiation poisoning after a level R9 earthquake and resulting tsunami killed 25000 people. All harm from Fukishima will come from people's panic and fear, fuelled by people like you that perpetuate nuclear FUD.

⬐ ljf

The waste is not simply the spent nuclear fuel, but much of the machinery and systems around it, plus the discarded items used daily in the management of a plant (clothes etc).

This low level nuclear waste while 'only' dangerous for 100 to 500 years, is huge - vastly bigger than the 76000 metric tons of spent fuel:

http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Si...

I don't have the tonnage of the low level waste to hand, but it is certainly much larger than the high level waste.

⬐ adrianN

Waste is a political problem that could be taken care of with breeder reactors. You don't need to bury the stuff when >90% of the fuel is still unused.

⬐ maverick_iceman

0 people died in Fukushima and 28 in Chernobyl. I think 28 deaths in 70 years is a sign of a pretty safe technology.

⬐ antris

> Costs

Mainly due to politicians drafting rules to require more safety out of nuclear than any form of other energy solution. Of course it's more expensive if it's 100x more regulated.

> Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former salt mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not nothing at all

And what damage has these "unsafe" storages caused, especially compared to other forms of energy creation? Coal is basically pumping out the radioactive waste into the air we breathe. It's better to have few concentrated places for the waste rather than spread it all around the air little by little.

You can't just say "nuclear waste" and be done. You have to compare the data between different solutions.

> Security and safety: They're centralized infrastructure, attacking them has catastrophic consequences, unknown unknows like in Fukushima and human errors like in Chernobyl do happen and lead to catastrophes.

Funny you mention Fukushima, where zero people have died or gotten sick due to radiation, and experts say that the toll will probably stay at zero. Overall nuclear has the lowest mortality rate per MWh of any form of energy: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...

⬐ Symmetry

Well, the radiation from Fukushima is expected to cause a few hundred cancer cases[1] even if nobody died from acute radiation poisoning. And there likely would have been acute radiation poisoning deaths if there hadn't been an evacuation, though probably far less than the 1600 deaths the evacuation caused. But even with all that the ~1 trillionkWhr Fukushima generated over it's lifetime puts it's death toll well below the Forbes numbers for even a US coal plant at 10,000.

On the other hand, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air gives coal mortality at 350 to 60[2] after converting to the same units which is well below Fukushima's death toll.

[1]http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pd... [2]http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml

⬐ dv_dt

Now compare against an energy technology that is not Coal.

⬐ antris

Yeah, you seem to be closer to the truth. I was assuming old knowledge from this summer, when Wikipedia was still saying that deaths won't be likely to increase:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fukushima_Daiichi...

>As of March 2012, no cases of radiation-related ailments had been reported. Experts cautioned that data was insufficient to allow conclusions on health impacts. Michiaki Kai, professor of radiation protection at Oita University of Nursing and Health Sciences, stated, "If the current radiation dose estimates are correct, (cancer-related deaths) likely won't increase."

Still, it seems pretty ridiculous to worry about nuclear safety when the actual tsunami killed over 15,000 people and nobody seems to be up in arms why there weren't better safeguards against tsunamis.

⬐ dv_dt

> ... Fukushima, where zero people have died or gotten sick due to radiation

No one has died of outright first-order radiation poisoning, but it's a specious claim with respect to long term cancer rates since we lack the tools to pinpoint the cause of a cancer death.

Workers have received high does of radiation, and some models predict hundreds of future cancer deaths (but some models predict zero). Even if someone in the exposed population were to die, we would be very unlikely be able to say for sure if that death were due to 'natural' cancer or cancer induced by exposure to some substance leaked. That doesn't make the exposure or the technology safe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

⬐ antris

Yes you are correct. As I mentioned elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12725402), I made that statement under old information. I stand corrected.

But the larger point still stands about nuclear being the safest form of energy we have. Even the worst case scenario of 600 eventual deaths won't sway the numbers for nuclear very much.

My argument isn't that nuclear is 100% safe, I'm just asking for it to be honestly compared to the alternatives.

⬐ lamontcg

> > Costs > Mainly due to politicians drafting rules to require more safety out of nuclear than any form of other energy solution. Of course it's more expensive if it's 100x more regulated.

I've read this online in one form or another for the better part of 10 years. I've never seen a single actual study to back it up.

⬐ antris

Which part of it is questionable to you? That nuclear is more regulated than other forms of energy? That regulation increases building costs?

⬐ lamontcg

That regulation is the cause of the bulk of the costs and/or that regulation is the cause of nuclear's negative learning curve. There's an assertion here that nuclear would be cheap if only it wasn't regulated so tightly, and I've never seen an actual cost-breakdown to support that.

⬐ skybrian

Nobody died from Fukoshima but a large area had to be evacuated. When calculating the cost of nuclear power, you have to include the cost of insurance to cover relocating the surrounding communities in case of an accident.

And if anyone did require power companies to have this insurance, it's likely that nobody would invest.

⬐ lmm

> Nobody died from Fukoshima but a large area had to be evacuated. When calculating the cost of nuclear power, you have to include the cost of insurance to cover relocating the surrounding communities in case of an accident.

Sure, but again you need to compare like with like. How many people relocated per megawatt? The numbers for the alternatives are worse.

⬐ stcredzero

How many people relocated per megawatt? The numbers for the alternatives are worse.

In some places, hydro isn't very pretty by this measure.

⬐ nickff

If you require power companies to get all this insurance, you no longer have any reason to regulate them (using the government), as there are no externalities (because the company bears the costs of a failure). This might be a good trade-off, as insurers are likely to be more judicious and less political with their inspections and requirements.

⬐ paulmd

Similarly, we should also cover the cost of insurance to cover areas contaminated from coal fly ash spills (including waste seepage downstream, not just direct coverage).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...

If other power sources had to factor in the full costs of such contamination they would be uneconomical as well. We need to have power if we want to have nice things, it's purely a question of figuring out how to do it in the most responsible way possible.

For that matter we should probably also factor in upstream contamination - landscape destruction due to large-scale strip mining for coal [1], or pollution from lithium/neodymium refining and silicon fabrication. These are measures where uranium mining has essentially zero pollution but both coal, solar, and wind all have fairly significant pollution footprints.

[1] 1 year's supply of fuel for a 100MW (?) power plant visualized, coal vs nuclear: http://i.imgur.com/Qst8z.gif

⬐ johmue

> Costs

The politicians are not "drafting rules to require more safety" just for fun. Not regulating nuclear energy makes it cheaper but seems rather unsafe. (because humans, you know)

⬐ ekun

It's not that the regulations are ill-intentioned but currently they are preventing safer technologies from being implemented because it costs billions of dollars to get technologies licensed properly.

⬐ ageofwant

Fine, now please apply the same logic to coal plants that kill 7000000 people/year.

⬐ sqeaky

7 million per year. This seems outright false despite being as pro nuclear as I am.

Can you back this up?

⬐ antris

I think the number is actually the total for global deaths in air pollution: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollut...

Coal is not the only contributor, but still a major one:

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1632163/670000-deaths...

670,000 reported deaths because of coal annually in China

⬐ antris

I agree that their intentions are good, but you have to draw a line somewhere between cost and safety. Nothing we do is completely risk-free. You can get choked eating food, you can get into a car accident, yet food and transportation industries haven't been regulated to death. Why should nuclear be singled out, when it's already the safest form of energy of all time?

⬐ mtgx

> Mainly due to politicians drafting rules to require more safety out of nuclear than any form of other energy solution.

I wonder if that's because of things like Fukushima...

You can't have it both ways.

1) Nuclear is safe because there are regulations - Fukushima just had bad safety policies implemented. That's all

and

2) We can't have too many nuclear regulations - that would make nuclear too expensive!

Solar/batteries are the future. They are both going to drop in price by multiples over the next decade, and then some more after that.

I also think there are very few companies that wouldn't rather build solar/battery power plants now, even if more expensive to build at first, but much cheaper to maintain later, than deal with the complexities and regulations and uncertainties of nuclear power plants.

Nuclear should've "won" 30-40 years ago with the whole "too cheap to meter" thing. It's too late now. There are much better alternatives that are close to being competitively priced, or will be soon enough.

⬐ mseebach

No, we can't have it both ways, which is why we're explicitly asking to not have it both ways.

Let's apply the same level of rational risk tolerance to nuclear power as we do to all other power sources. Nuclear isn't 100.00% safe, but it's already a lot safer than any other source. People die from falling off roofs when installing solar and nobody bats an eye because shit happens and life goes on. Let's accept that nuclear is extremely (if not absolutely) safe, and make sure we learn from mistakes, accidents and near-misses when they do happen -- like we did (and do) with aviation.

⬐ jschwartzi

I think the difference in attitude comes from how /specific/ a risk factor is. Falling off a roof is very specific to the person doing the installation, and it's easily foreseeable to the installer. This makes it easier to ignore. In contrast, fallout from a reactor failure is very general. You basically draw some distorted circles on a map, and everyone in those circles is affected.

It's way more terrifying because you have basically no control over the risk once a reactor is built. Worse, if you lived in the area before the reactor existed you've just gained a new risk factor. If you're a homeowner you can pack up and move, but that's a major undertaking to avoid a risk that someone else created for you.

In contrast, the solar installer has direct control over their exposure to the risk. They were aware of it before entering the situation, and they can eliminate the hazard at any time by quitting.

⬐ makomk

> Funny you mention Fukushima, where zero people have died or gotten sick due to radiation, and experts say that the toll will probably stay at zero.

This is the problem with the pro-nuclear approach to nuclear safety. Fukoshima was a massive safety failure. Something that was supposed to never happen did, the cooling failed, the reactors melted down, the containment breached and radioactive isotopes leaked and kept on leaking. At that point, it's not engineering that's protecting people, it's sheer luck and we don't even know the odds of the bet or the stake. We don't know how likely it was for an even bigger containment breach to occur, for things to have gone far worse, because the whole event was outside of the plan. Not only that, it was due to an issue that had already been pointed out by TEPCO's internal planning documents and ignored. (Then there's the huge economic costs of the radiation leaks.) Just ignoring this as a minor incident is inviting further failures which may not be so kind.

⬐ antris

I agree that it's a major failure, but doesn't that just mean that nuclear is even safer than people expect?

Safety systems, backup safety systems, backup-backup safety systems can go down, and yet, the plant kills nobody. Even though the radiator had a meltdown, it was passively contained and the radiation didn't leak out in dangerous quantities.

You mention that we don't know how likely a bigger containment was to occur, but I think there's barely a nugget of truth in that. The way the radioactive material was contained is very well understood. The safety systems worked, despite anything TEPCO did.

⬐ ageofwant

And yet not a single person died or are likely to die due to radiation poisoning. This begs the question, if all those fail-safes failed, do we really need them ?

⬐ neaden

Radiation poisoning isn't the only way to get sick or die from radiation.

⬐ sliverstorm

Well, it was certainly still a pain in the butt to clean up.

⬐ saulrh

Fukushima was fifty years old. Compared to modern reactors, it's approximately as unsafe as a car from 1971 is compared to a modern car [1]. Which is to say, it's pants-shittingly unsafe and we should've replaced it 20 years ago but idiots say we're not allowed to "because it's dangerous oooh noooo".

If you want to badmouth nuclear by spouting off its worst-case scenarios rather than its average or expected scenarios, I invite you to do the same for the alternatives. Coal's worst case causes the Great Smog and Beijing and New Delhi. Oil's worst case causes the Exxon Valdez and Piper Alpha and the Texas City Refinery explosion and oh yeah global climate change. Hydro's worst case is the Banqiao Dam burst, which directly killed 200,000 people and forced 11 million out of their homes. Badmouthing nuclear over fukushima and chernobyl is like badmouthing cars because a Fluorine tanker crashed in downtown Seattle around 1935.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g

⬐ random_upvoter

I'm sure that at the time the Fukushima reactor was built, the general public was assured that its design was perfectly safe. Now you are claiming that it was, in fact, "pants-shittingly unsafe" and the modern designs are much safer. So my question is, why should the general public believe you this time? Because this time, you're really serious?

⬐ saulrh

In comparison to modern reactor designs and the alternatives. Do you think that water heaters are unsafe? Do you think that skyscrapers are unsafe, or bridges, or kitchens, or factories, or electrical wiring? All of those things were, at one time, horrific. When was the last time you seriously worried about your wiring burning your house down?

Asking for "perfectly safe" is idiotic. There's no such thing. There is always a chance that you will get wrapped up in your sheets and strangle in the middle of the night, or that you'll accidentally stab yourself in the wrist with a pencil and bleed out at your desk. Safety is relative. What we have today is better than what we had twenty years ago. What we had twenty years ago was better than what we had forty years ago.

I'd take Fukushima over coal or oil or hydro every day. It took every variation on malice and incompetence that humankind could devise to make it do anything bad, and its "anything" was honestly kind of pathetic compared to the "anythings" for anything else. I'd take a modern reactor over it, but it's take it over the alternatives. And, yes, I'd probably take whatever people have come up with in 30 years over today's technology. Science marches on.

⬐ ethbro

To synthesize what both of you are saying, I think the biggest problem nuclear has is that (a) current regulations make new reactor construction prohibitively expensive & (b) current regulations are designed around preventing problems that occurred in reactors 50 years ago.

We're essentially strangling the innovation that would fix the things we're terrified of, which are why the regulations exist in the first place!

As a result, we still have Gen II reactors (Watts Bar) coming online. In 2016.

⬐ saulrh

Bureaucracy: "We can't let you build this. It doesn't satisfy requirement IXX.53-A."

Engineer: "The one about the primary turboencabulator?"

Bureaucracy: "Yes. Your reactor needs it to be certified to the standards laid out in Index 437."

Engineer: "There aren't any turboencabulators in the design. Our design uses retroencabulators. That's how it's so safe; the primary turboencabulator was the primary failure point. There is no primary turboencabulator to certify."

Bureaucracy: "I'm sorry, but we can't accept this design without a certification for a primary turboencabulator. It can't be safe without one. Maybe you should start over?"

⬐ digi_owl

Thing is though, how can the engineer claim this new retroencabulator is safe?

If he has documented tests etc, how about going the route of getting the paperwork amended? And if not, should the bureaucrats just take his word that this time it is safe? That was what they were saying with the turboencabulator as well...

⬐ ethbro

I think the problem the parent was getting at is that parts new enough that regulations have not been written are automatically non-viable due to bureaucracy substituting outsourced regulation documents for in-house technical expertise. With the end result of regulators being incapable of making technical decisions that fall outside the already written regulated scenarios.

I would hope that this is less of an issue in nuclear regulation, due to them hopefully having engineering resources on staff. But I do know it's a common problem with less technically focused branches of government.

http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_n...

A good TED Talk with the speaker going over the data of global green energy supply/demand. China/India's initiatives to build the next generation of nuclear has halted, mainly out of lack of demand and lack of released data.

The result has been a net loss of green energy globally, and an even greater loss going forward. Nuclear reactors simply provide more carbon-free energy than other renewables by several orders of magnitude, you simply cannot solve the green energy crisis without a heavy investment in nuclear technology.

Unfortunately that investment is hampered by an irrational terror of nuclear energy, even though all the usual candidates for why "nuclear is bad" have been thoroughly and consistently debunked.