The World Really Could Go Nuclear
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Well, exactly. The most noisy and alarmist aren't interested in producing energy at all. They are only interested in de-industrialisation and de-population.
Of course nuclear fission is the answer to large scale energy. It always has been. Weapons proliferation can be addressed with new designs and materials. Safety can be addressed with passive systems.
The technical answers are simple compared to fusion or elaborate harvesting of diffuse energy such as sunlight, wind or tides.
The logical conclusion is that the people making the most noise are not in it for the solutions, but for the noise and attention. I'm not the only one to think this, but expect the groupthink to smite my comment anyway.
No. They are actually interesting in assuming power in the society by foregoing the standard societal ascension mechanisms.
I'm not convinced restarting nuclear makes sense today though. Solar seems to be on an economically winning trajectory and building nuclear plants is very expensive, apparently even for countries that are good at it, like France.
Do you want to talk about nuclear energy on HN, or do you want to talk about how you feel about talking about nuclear energy on HN? The former topic seems much more interesting than the latter.
Don't think he meant it as a dismissal, just as a preemptive nudge to discourage actual groupthink.
For countries that already have nuclear weapons, I don't even see a valid argument against nuclear power. Agree, the only think holding us back is politicians who are afraid to use the word "nuclear."
* Serious, INES 7 nuclear incidents can render whole regions uninhabitable.
* Health impact from nuclear incidents can be insidious, revealing themselves only in long-term statistics, which can make risks hard to gauge.
* Waste containment remains an unsolved problem.
There are probably many other valid arguments.
I think people underestimate the impact of coal, and de-industrialization is totally unrealistic and would almost certainly do far more damage to more people than nuclear would. But to suggest that nuclear isn't fraught, or that the only concern was proliferation... that doesn't seem intellectually honest.
Incidents from non-nuclear plants cause way more deaths (in short term and long term). Coal kills people too, by polluting the air with fine particles.
> * Waste containment remains an unsolved problem.
Where? There's tons of space deep in the ground, it's not like we are running out of place of where to put it. Plus, there are ways to recycle used nuclear fuel to make it less radioactive.
Germany has been searching for a suitable place for many decades now, though I'll admit that politics is getting in the way.
And you still need to contain the waste. Think Asse. Everyone assured us it was perfectly safe, then we found out the barrels were rusted through, falling over one another and leaking.
And then you need to make sure nobody just digs it up. Tomorrow. In a hundred years. In ten thousand years. Have fun designing the universally understood signage.
Chernobyl is responsible for more-or-less 4,000 total deaths.
Air pollution is responsible for about 200,000 deaths in the U.S. annually, and about 7,000,000 annual deaths worldwide (more than smoking).
I think the only open issue with waste containment is that the waste will remain radioactive for 100s of thousands of years, possibly longer than time it would take the container to break down (and I guess someone might try and dig it up?). Not a real practical threat.
What shocked me more than anything about the accident, is that when things go horribly wrong with Nuclear, we literally have no plan. We have no way of getting inside to stop things getting worse, or to contain what has already happened. We literally stood around watching, waiting, to see what would happen. When the highly contaminated water flowed into the ocean, the response was "where else did you think it would go?".
I'm aware that new reactor designs mean things going that badly is very unlikely in the future, but I still think it's scary we can build a machine with such immense power, and it can get to a point where we just stand back and watch it go bad.
Nuclear power plants produce a lot of power very cheaply for many years. But companies can't help but push the boundaries to boost profits, extending plant life past spec and skimping on maintenance and safety measures, with just a bit of regulatory capture to smooth the process.
I'm still pro-nuclear. We just need to follow through on the regulation. Maybe we can start by not being so damn secretive about nuclear stuff. Anyway, we have to build new ones to take on the capacity so we can shut down old ones. Which means we can't be so scared of building them, since not building them is what's unsafe.
The contamination might kill a few hundred, and has resulted in an exclusion zone.
IMO, the biggest problem with nuclear is how unacceptable disasters are. One old reactors built in high risk zone has a little meltdown, and the entire world freaks out over it. This is a major practical impediment to nuclear - you won't get costs getting driven down (for better or worse), because people see the risk as completely taboo.
It's like people worrying about tall buildings, because of 9/11. There's always risks.
And how many of those can we afford to have in the world?
How much liquid contaminated waste can we put into the ocean?
How many countries can afford to feed their population when their farmlands have turned to arid deserts and their coastal cities are all underwater? Just look at all the recent super storms and California's drought. Compare that to fukushima. And this is only the beginning. Global warming is the threat you should be worried about.
I don't know, if Iowa and Nebraska got hit by a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, I would be pretty fucking terrified.
Every generation of reactor get safer. Even if they weren't, we learn from every accident. Fukushima could have been prevented. In fact, Onagawa a nearly identical reactor under similar circumstances was spared by the heroic efforts of its operators.[1]
[1] http://thebulletin.org/onagawa-japanese-nuclear-power-plant-...
The ocean can take a lot of contimination. Obviously nobody wants that, but a tiny bit of somewhat radioactive water is going to dilute quite substantially.
A lot. The Wikipedia article [1] quotes a flow rate of 400 tons per day. Let's suppose that that flow rate was maintained for 30 years, a typical reactor lifetime (which is far longer than anyone is claiming a flow of contaminated waste from Fukushima). That comes to 400 * 365 * 30 = 438,000 tons of contaminated water, or 4.4 x 10^8 kg.
According to the Physics Factbook, the mass of water in Earth's oceans is about 1.3 x 10^21 kg. So 30 years' worth of contaminated water from Fukushima amounts to about 0.3 parts per trillion of contaminated water in Earth's oceans. That's not even comparable to naturally occurring trace radioactive elements.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Rad... [2] http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/AvijeetDut.shtml
But good luck defending that one politically, no matter how much you've got physics on your side.
This is what I don't understand. The earthquake and tsunami that caused Fukushima's problems killed 20,000 people, and created an almost unimaginable amount of devastation. No one has died from Fukushima's radiation, and no one is expected to die. How horrible would the disaster have to be for a 1,000 people to have died from radiation? Would there have been 1,000,000 other deaths?
> I still think it's scary we can build a machine with such immense power
...this nails it on the head. It seems like most of the thoughts about nuclear power seems to be in the category of "we've created something unnatural, and we're worried that we'll anger the gods, and they'll release the invisible evil spirits as punishment". Not that I'm saying that we shouldn't have to take aspect of human nature into account.
http://myths.e2bn.org/mythsandlegends/textonly562-pandoras-b...
What was your reaction when the Deepwater Horizon spill happened? We had no real plan then, either. And the aggregate impact of that incident was arguably larger than that of Fukushima. (For example, the "highly contaminated water" released into the ocean from Fukushima is probably going to do a lot less ecological damage than the oil released by Deepwater Horizon. The contaminated water will just get diluted to the point where it's indistinguishable from other ocean water. The oil, not so much.)
> we can build a machine with such immense power, and it can get to a point where we just stand back and watch it go bad.
First of all, a nuclear reactor that produces 1 Gw of electricity doesn't have any more "immense power" than a coal, oil, or natural gas plant that produces the same electrical power output.
Second, we have every right to insist that, before a nuclear reactor gets built, we have a contingency plan in case something goes wrong. But, to be fair, we should insist on that for all sources of energy. Want to drill for oil? What's your contingency plan if there's a leak in the well? As I commented to someone else upthread, nuclear power appears to be the only energy technology where everyone focuses on the worst case; other energy sources seem to get what amounts to a free pass in this regard.
Stop putting those control rods in there and see how much energy it will generate.....
Which is not what happened at Fukushima, or TMI, or even Chernobyl, so it's irrelevant. You might as well say, stop metering fuel into that natural gas plant and light it off all at once and see how much energy it will generate. If we are going to restrict ourselves to energy sources that can't possibly be misused, we won't have any energy sources at all. Even solar can be made to do damage if it's focused.
What is important is that we be proactive. Nuclear plants are reaching end of life, and will either be replaced with more nuclear or replaced with coal. Those are the choices. Coal mining kills more people than nuclear ever has.
Life is risky. By all means make sane decisions on risk but the current policy of sitting on our hands and hoping for a miracle is just wrong. Replace old plants with better designed, safer, new plants.
cough waste management cough
We're talking about megayear timescales when it comes to nuclear fission waste.
Humans have been around for how long? What's the age of the oldest building around? What's the usual timescale for modern age buildings to deteriorate?
Russia has two fast reactors in commercial operation right now, one since 1980. The U.S. had the Integral Fast Reactor almost complete in the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration shut down the program.
The rest of the waste is fission products. Encase them in glass and bury them, they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries. That's a human timescale. When I lived in Germany, we had a brewery in town that had been continuously operating for 800 years.
Not every transuran is viable fuel. Some of the stuff is actually actively getting in the way of an efficient fission chain reaction.
The key benefit of fast breeder reactors is, that you can fuel them with stuff that's more abundant on Earth, so you're not getting into a fuel shortage (our supplies of U235 are quite limited, some 70 years or so, using conventional fission reactors). So you need to either go through a fast U238→Pu239 or a Th232→U233 process if you want to make use of the abundant stuff.
Oh, and most of the fission products are not very pleasant either and you can't efficiently burn them in any way whatsoever. Burner Accelerators? I've got a few things for you to look up: Penetration epth, Bragg peak, small volume active zone.
> The rest of the waste is fission products. Encase them in glass and bury them, they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries.
Unfortunately not. The generation zero of nuclides will decay in that timeframe. But all the other stuff to follow, less radioactive, but still dangerous, takes much more time to decay; and those daughter generation nuclides is where the headaches start. And it's not just the physics that's a problem, it's also chemistry. Some of the elements that are born are quite aggressive, chemically.
If we really want to break up all the transuranics, neutrons from D-T fusion would crack them apart handily. We already have 70% energy return with D-T fusion; a hybrid fission-fusion reactor would probably achieve net power just with that.
As you correctly pointed out, radioactivity is inversely proportional to half-life. Or in other words, given the same chemical concentration the net half-life of the remaining nuclear waste would be on the same timescale as the of uranium ore.
The most abundant uranium isotope us U238, with a half life of about 703Ma. Here's a list of half-lifes of the most common fission and spallation products:
99Tc 211ka (side note: used as radioactive tracer nuclear medicine)
126Sn 230ka
79Se 327ka
93Zr 1.53Ma
135Cs 2.3Ma
107Pd 6.5Ma
129I 15.7Ma
- Those are all isotopes, which you can't actively "break down" further without making things worse. A couple of those above are very efficient at neutron capture, thereby getting slightly more radioactive, still not enough to significantly shorten the half-life.
- Those are still about 1000 to 20000 times more radioactive than U238, so it's a far cry to call that "comparable to uranium in a reasonable timeframe"
- We're definitely in the Ma timescale here. Say you want that nuclear waste decay down to 0.1% of the original material. How long does it take? Easy enough to figure out: 0.001 > 2^-n → n = log2(1000) =~= 10. Or in other words, it takes 10 half life periods for the stuff to break down to a concentration, that's still far from being homeopathic.
When it comes to technology IMHO a reasonable timeframe to deal with technological aftermath is 50 years (and not more). Anything beyond that and it will become a clusterfuck simply due to "human nature". Heck, today we've even got problem erecting structures that will last longer than 50 years without requiring major maintenance. And if you're honest about it, except for the few outliers of historical significance (the pyramids, port walls built by the Romans with their "super concrete" we still haven't reverse engineered, and such) we humans are quite terrible in building stuff that can go by without maintenance for more than a few decades.
And that's the core problem in nuclear waste management. A problem I'd like to point out, we have to solve, because there's already plenty of nuclear waste around.
Oh and then there's of course the problem how to treat and prepare the highly radioactive waste for long term storage in the first place. One of the proposed methods (and already employed by some nuclear energy companies) is to melt it into glass. But here's the problem: Glass is a quite complex material and its mechanical properties largely depend on its chemical composition. Radioactivity however means, that the chemistry is changing over time. Not to mention that some stages of the decay chain have a very high vapour pressure or are gaseous at ambient temperature/pressure. Which in turn means: Your once solid and smooth slab of glass will form lots of cracks, may even break down at some spots into fine sand (which could become air or waterborne).
I did my graduation thesis at an accelerator facility where also some aspects of nuclear waste treatment were researched. If you see some of the principal investigators in that area doing research on the renewable energy stock market or even having invested in family members green energy startups and advertising for them, that's a very strong signal.
I dropped a few words there. It should read:
given the same chemical concentration and demanding the radioactivite density (decays per time per mass) of the remaining nuclear waste to be on a similar level as of that of uranium ore it has to have either a similar net half-life or be appropriately diluted (and uranium ore already is quite diluted by itself)
No, we're not. Anything with megayear halflifes is effectively not radioactive.
There's a lot of great answers. None of them are politically feasible because instead of thinking of it as an engineering problem, people think of it with the Sealed Evil In A Can memeset [1] and treat it like it is eternally a baleful evil demon that smites everyone that so much as thinks about it for too long, by magic.
It is, literally, a small problem, as in, literally, we're not really talking about very much stuff volumetrically.
It's only a problem because paradoxically people treat it with such fear that it stays a problem, because we're so fearful that nobody is even allowed to try to solve the problem because to our fearful brains it would basically be poking the baleful evil spirit with a stick. If it were just legal to stick it in glass bricks and stack them up somewhere, as has been studied, we could be done thinking about it, but instead we have to leave it in a more dangerous form. It is frankly difficult for me not to see this as a problem that people in charge make sure to deliberately make sure stays unsolved because it suits them, not because I'm really prone to conspiracy theories but simply because while not necessarily "trivial", it's just not that hard of a problem. You should fear your local garbage dump a lot more than you fear a pile of glass bricks piled in a mountain in Nevada.
[1]: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SealedEvilInACan
Yes, we are. You've to consider the daughter and grand^n-daughter nuclides as well. Makes for a very nice undergrad tutorial on coupled differential equations. Fun times.
One mountain can be used to bury the waste. That is a tiny footprint compared to other, conventional means.
Even a single small hydro dam - itself a great way of making power - covers a far larger area of the earths surface than all the nuclear waste ever made, combined. Compared to coal waste and even the mining waste for rare earths, it is a tiny amount of waste.
In his book Storms of My Grandchildren he strongly advocates nuclear power, especially GenIV designs. In particular he talks about the Integral Fast Reactor.
Plenty of other prominent environmentalists are advocating nuclear these days; the documentary Pandora's Promise highlights several of them. And James Lovelock, who invented the "Gaia" concept, has advocated nuclear for years.
Sure, it's cheap in theory, but nuclear power projects bring with them enormous project management risk. If you complete 90% of a wind farm installation, you get 90% of the power out. Completing 90% of a nuclear reactor gets you no power at all, and unexpected cost overruns can add up to billions of dollars. When a reactor shuts down for repairs, they sometimes take decades to complete. As of today, it can be argued that many countries' nuclear power programs were a financial mistake.
Then, once in a while, you find out that the original cost-benefit analysis was wrong. After the Fukushima accident left $200 billion of real estate uninhabitable, nuclear power plants across the world have revised their risk models, and now are spending more money for safety upgrades.
Finally, emerging technologies like wind and solar are showing immense promise, but predicting their future cost is equally difficult. All the best minds can only put together a very educated guess.
Yes, if we had started focusing on nuclear power 40 years ago -- and if we had done it carefully and properly the first time -- it would have been the right decision.
But we got it wrong, and the today risks of getting it wrong again are bigger than ever.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/the-forgotten-histor...
In particular, simple molten-salt reactors like those designed by Terrestrial Energy and ThorCon look very promising.
I think the arguments in the article point out that there are lots of costs associated with these small reactors. Not the least of which is that they require decommissioning sooner than their larger counterparts and that the cost of decommissioning alone can make the reactor non-viable economically. It's not clear how changing the working fluid would reduce decommissioning costs.
Here's a good rundown of ThorCon's cost projections: http://thorconpower.com/costing
It doesn't use any technology that wasn't proven in the 1970s: http://thorconpower.com/features/no-new-technology
The reactor cores are in sealed replaceable "cans." They run for four years, cool for four years, and then shipped back to a processing facility.
Terrestrial Energy has a similar design: sealed factory-built units with a simple liquid fueled design, based on the Oak Ridge molten salt reactor: http://terrestrialenergy.com/imsr-technology/
Safety is completely passive, based on the inherent physics of the fuel and coolant. It's at atmospheric pressure, with no possibility of a chemical explosion like we saw at Fukushima. Fission products mostly plate out or are chemically bound in the salt. In ThorCon's case, if the reactor lose electricity, a frozen plug of fuel melts, and all the fuel drains out to a tank designed to passively cool it.
Seriously, solar is already at cost parity and the economics are getting better with time. Plus externalities are minimal. Compared to nuclear power which gets less economic over time and has very open ended externalities.
As a load following, top-up power source for peak daytime usage, or for charging storage based devices like cars, it's great. But you cannot compare solar and nuclear because they are entirely separate classes of energy production.
Nuclear power in Canada is a complete success. We generate at 6 to 7 cents per kilowatt hour in the first 30 years, and the amortized cost continues to decrease after that. Yes there are maintenance costs, but do you know what else there are? Medical isotopes that the world desperately needs to keep our diagnostics working.
You can make nuclear cheap and safe. The problem is cultural, not scientific. If a society is too greedy and corrupt or too deferent to authority, then nuclear won't work. But in places like Canada, Sweden, and France they work very, very well.
Also, Thorium reactors are much less likely to cause problems and they are part of the fifth gen reactor designs.
We need both nuclear and solar.
In 1999, Ontario Hydro's debt stood at $38.1 billion, most of which came from the construction of nuclear plants. For comparison, the entire government debt at the time was a little over $100 billion.
These plants will continue operating well into this century, so when all is said and done, all of the cost overruns (and the 17 year shutdown at Bruce) will hopefully be worth it.
But it's unreasonable to consider nuclear power to be a complete and clear-cut "home run" and to suggest that, as the original article stated, "only fear and capital" stand in the way of rolling out more nuclear plants.
The entire series is a gold mine for people who actually want to talk about energy generation and climate change on an informed basis rather than just making guesses to suit their particular world view.
With that said, one of my favorite futurists, Ramez Naam, who is a big proponent of Wind and Solar (See: http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/30/how-steady-can-the-wind-blow... and http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/10/how-cheap-can-solar-get-very...) still thinks we should invest in nuclear, as it has an important role to play in regions where renewable resources (Solar/Wind/GeoThermal/HydroElectric etc...) are not available, and as a hedge against storage (which is critical for solar/wind) technology not advancing to where we need it for 100% support of base-load power.
Though he also talks about Storage here: http://rameznaam.com/2015/04/14/energy-storage-about-to-get-...
Nate Lewis is also a great speaker, and he makes such a convincing argument that Solar is the only possible future source of energy. (Nuclear doesn't even come close)
He also shows that putting solar panels on roofs doesn't even come close to what we need to do.
Worth watching every 3-4 months just to get your head around the scale of the problem.
Financial mistake or not, not being dependent on Petrol for your electricity production is a huge win. It solves many other (political) problems.
Also, there's the usual argument that with proliferation of a technology you gain efficiencies and costs drop (precipitously sometimes).
>>> Yes, if we had started focusing on nuclear power 40 years ago -- and if we had done it carefully and properly the first time -- it would have been the right decision.
Pushing the problem down the road because the solution isn't perfect probably is not the best idea at this point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
And that doesn't even account for the cost of the reactors...
To answer this, you need to ask "compared to what?"
The article's implicit assumption is that the comparison should be between a possibly quite expensive future with nuclear power, and a possibly even more expensive future with climate change that is extremely costly to deal with. If you agree with the second possibility being a realistic one (I personally don't, but that's really a separate discussion), then the first one can look cost-effective, simply because it's cheaper than the alternative.
If, OTOH, you're comparing nuclear power with cheap fossil fuels, in an environment where even safe nuclear reactors have to undergo years of legal challenges on the NIMBY principle, whereas a new coal, oil, or natural gas plant gets up and running quickly, then of course nuclear power isn't going to look cost-effective. (People who favor the previous comparison, with the "expensive climate change" alternative, would probably say the "cheap fossil fuel" alternative only looks cheap because it doesn't take all the costs into account.) But that could change if fossil fuels get more expensive (whether because they simply get harder to extract, or they face increasing regulation based on other factors like climate change).
> if we had started focusing on nuclear power 40 years ago -- and if we had done it carefully and properly the first time -- it would have been the right decision.
Now you seem to be making a different implicit comparison, between what we have now and what you think we would have if we'd focused "carefully and properly" on nuclear power from the start. But we arguably haven't focused "carefully and properly" on fossil fuels either; for example, coal dust has killed far more people by causing respiratory problems than nuclear power has, yet it took decades for "clean coal" to even be a talking point. Why should nuclear be the only technology where we have to do it "carefully and properly" or not at all? If you're going to compare them fairly, you have to compare them at equivalent levels of risk.
That is really not the most basic problem though. Cost is a non-issue if the alternative is green house gas emissions which will eventually cause an apocalyptic global warming effect. What good will all the cost savings do at that point?
Putting that aside, I agree with you completely.
To make matters worse, most nuclear reactors in the United States were built in the 1960s and 1970s and they were only designed for a lifespan of 40 years, which means most of them should be shut down. However, since a lot of money is at stake with how much reactors cost, regulators rewrite the rules and extend the useful life of the reactors and put us all in danger. That is what bothers me and that is why I am against nuclear reactors - because when money is on the line, all bets are off.
From the data I'm able to find, coal energy results in about 170,000 deaths per trillion kilowatt-hours globally, compared to about 90 deaths per trillion kilowatt-hours generated from nuclear.
That would mean that burning coal for energy is nearly 2000x more dangerous than nuclear power.
Is there something more to the opposition's argument than safety? Or is this just a case of the public being misinformed?
Are you saying that running a gaming PC for 2 hours results in 170k deaths?
and the US rate is 15,000 or 1/10th of that.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
- The corporations building these things are hyper-corporations, many in the defense industry. Corporations, especially at that scale, are at best amoral. To meet environmental, safety, disposal and cost concerns, they will go part way, but when they hit the knees of the various curves, they will convince Congress and citizens through advertising, co-opted scientists, and bribed members of Congress that everything is great and it's been taken care of.
- Waste. After however many decades, where is all the nuclear waste? Are we finally implementing the long range plans, to take care of wast and make future generations safe? At least out hundreds of years I would expect. I think the answer here is effectively no. I think we're still just studying it, and all involved are hoping someone else will deal with it later. There will never be enough Senators to vote for specific locations in their states, and transportation through their states. "On site" will magically be found to be perfectly fine after all. And it will end up being Hanford and Rocky Flats, with leaks into the water table, and shit stored next to shit that shouldn't be.
- Safety. What happens when we finally experience a catastrophe, because the corporations and governments kicked the safety can down the road so that these things could be built? It's going to happen, they're corporations and they must above all make a buck. What hyper-corporation could resist turning uranium into gold?
- Environmental. These things need to be cooled. They're next to rivers and oceans because of that. Ecosystems dwindle and die, because downstream temperatures will always be "within acceptable levels" that were set by agencies suffering from regulatory capture that are funded by bribed Congressmen. No one wants to be the single point of failure on the money pipeline.
- Cost. Balloon. Corporations make money no matter what. Even if a corporation is fined in proportion to its overrun, even if they refuse to pay and people are jailed (ha!), that money is still lost.
The only thing above that I'm inclined to give on is safety, it's probably an engineering possibility. But that's mere technical possibility, in the face of amoral corporations with a drive for profits stronger than the human drive for reproduction.
Color me sceptical.
Lots of people posting and reading this work for corporations.
Do bad actors exist? Sure. Are all corporations at scale amoral? You make them sound like machines programmed by megalomaniacs, not places created by, worked at and invested in by ordinary people. Every 'corporation' I have ever worked at has been filled with people trying to do a good job under whatever circumstances they find themselves in. Brushing off the majority of good that large companies do as an argument is not correct.
I'm talking about hyper-corporations and billion dollar contracts. That many people, chasing that much money ... no one who's gotten to the point that they could with authority say "Nah, we shouldn't do this, it's wrong," ever would say that. No one at that level of accomplishment and tenure has it in them to say "Oh, and are the fish in that river really safe?"
Ahem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/19/business/volkswagen-is-ord...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10240001
At best, corporations are amoral.
Today, with the rapid decline in the cost of solar energy, I'm far less convinced this would be a wise move.
Also, isn't Sweden supposedly phasing out nuclear power?
Based on my reading, I decided that the arguments in favor of nuclear power were significantly better than the defenses of renewable energy. So I made the strategic decision to write affirmatives about uranium enrichment and targeted procurement of nuclear-powered vessels.
That was how we won the national championship.
In other words: Even when the best debaters in the country have a year to prepare their counter-arguments, nuclear energy still tends to come out on top. Like facts, energy density is a stubborn thing.
I'll add that we especially are risking other people's lives. While most people reading this have reaped the benefits of fossil fuels, likely we and our decendents mostly will survive while people in poor countries die.
China has 13 nuclear stations under construction, with 61 reactors and a total capacity of 40 to 75 gigawatts.
Something similar is happening with nuclear energy vs fossil fuel.
I wish this could be reframed somehow, but maybe it's just how humans deal poorly with risk.
I have yet to see waste from solar or wind mismanaged, or a solar or wind plant not be cooled properly after a fault, causing a meltdown.
Everyone comes to Hacker News comment threads like this to expound that nuclear is the way, while solar and wind continue their march towards domination. A nuclear plant takes ~10 years and at least $1 billion USD to come online. Solar and wind are going to be even further along by then.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-23/the-way-hu...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-30/seven-reas...
http://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/319535020/coal-gas-nuclear-hyd...
Except it's not really true. You get solar and wind power when you get it, not when you want it, so it's far less valuable. Once you add storage costs it's more expensive than nuclear.
With utility scale battery storage, yes, renewables are slightly more expensive than nuclear. Natural gas will carry the day until battery prices are driven down, which I expect to occur quickly considering Tesla's Gigafactory production is already sold out for its first ~2 years.
"The Kauai Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC) has signed a deal with SolarCity to purchase power from what the companies claim is the first fully-dispatchable utility-scale solar facility in the U.S., according to a press release.
The dispatchable solar plant has a 52 MWh battery system that will store energy generated during the day and allow it to feed up to 13 MW of electricity back onto the grid during the evening peak.
Under the 20-year power contract, KIUC will pay SolarCity 14.5 cents/kWh, less than the cost of conventional generation in Hawaii, and slightly more than the cost of power from the co-op's other exisiting solar farms.
KIUC CEO David Bissell said his co-op had been assessing storage options for the past two years and price has "always been the biggest challenge." He called the SolarCity project a "breakthrough ... on technology and price" that has finally made utility-scale storage cost-effective for KIUC."
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/hawaii-co-op-solarcity-ink-d...
Fukishima killed zero (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...). Chernobyl will kill about 4,000 when all's said and done (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/).
We lose more than that directly via coal mine accidents every year. Add in the deaths from pollution and the math gets even better in nuclear's favor.
Hell, hydroelectric killed 170k in 1975.
> The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), released a report on the Fukushima accident April 2, 2014. It stated that the scientists have found no evidence to support the idea that the nuclear meltdown in Japan in 2011 will lead to an increase in cancer rates or birth defects.
[1] http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pd...
Second, there's 9 plant workers that inarguably died from the event, the fact that they may not have died from radiation seems not all that important, do we write off the coal miners who died due to mine collapse and only look at lung cancer, etc.? Grandparent claim of "Fukushima killed zero" is simply a 100% false claim.
Third, similarly, there are non-radiation effects on general populace, described in more detail at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
Let's run with that for a moment.
According to Wikipedia, the tsunami caused 15,893 deaths, 6,152 injuries, and 2,572 missing. We're talking about a rounding error even in your worst case, in an exceedingly rare disaster.
I'm very much pro-nuclear power and while I don't think of it as a panacea I'm open to the idea that it might be. OTOH, like most pro-nuclear people, I'm not lining up to raise my family next door to the reactor and I also don't think that the case for the safety of nuclear power needs to be exaggerated. Being 'a lot safer than coal' is a box that a lot of alternative energy sources get to tick off and a number of them are safer than nuclear too.
985,000 isn't such a feel good number, after all.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-book-concludes-chernobyl-de...
We need to start with the premise that nuclear is safe, and work back from there. We can redefine terms and ignore any research that doesn't fit with our agenda. Then when people question whether its a good idea we can setup a straw man and compare it to something obviously worse, like coal mining, and thus claim by relativity everything is great!
Does this link make it more palatable to you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
Funny that that wikipedia link the OP posted actually contains the link to this page, but doesnt contain any information from within.
> The book was not peer reviewed by the New York Academy of Sciences. Five reviews were published in the academic press, with four of them considering the book severely flawed and contradictory, and one praising it while noting some shortcomings. The review by M. I. Balonov published by the New York Academy of Sciences concludes that the value of the report is negative, because it has very little scientific merit while being highly misleading to the lay reader. It also characterized the estimate of nearly a million deaths as more in the realm of science fiction than science.
Right from the reputable source link I provided:
"He explains that there have been 4000 cases of thyroid cancer, mainly in children, but that except for nine deaths, all of them have recovered. "Otherwise, the team of international experts found no evidence for any increases in the incidence of leukemia and cancer among affected residents.""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
How can the numbers be so different?
http://www.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/nfc/power/chernoby...
Everyone has an agenda when it comes to this topic. I don't know if its almost a million, but how can numbers vary from 50 on one hand, to almost a million on the other?