Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpdus | Hacker News Reader

This! In my opinion Thiel does not think far enough and doesn't talk about the real question: Is fission even (economically) competitive? In my opinion (and from what I've read on this subject), it is not and won't be in the foreseeable future.

I will quote myself [1]:

>People always forget about indirect costs when talking about cheap nuclear energy (risk factors aside). Nobody has ever built a profitable nuclear power plant without substantial government subsidies (way higher than for all renewable energy sources). Operators need government help for security, fuel supply, waste handling and much more. There is no insurance company on earth which will cover a nuclear power plant without state guarantees (ask yourself: Wouldn't a profit oriented insurance company cover these risks, of these were really as low and controllable as people say here?).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10143081

View on HN

> Is fission even (economically) competitive?

Remember that he's talking about a new generation of reactor designs. Also remember that a key driver of the high cost of nuclear energy is lawsuits based on irrational overestimates of the risk of nuclear energy compared to other energy sources. Coal has killed orders of magnitude more people than nuclear, yet nobody ever brings a NIMBY lawsuit to prevent a coal plant from being built.

> Wouldn't a profit oriented insurance company cover these risks, of these were really as low and controllable as people say here?

The technical risks are not the risks the insurance companies are worried about.

This times one hundred. Nuclear in the West is far more expensive than places like China and Vietnam not because western plants are better or safer but because they face incredible legal and regulatory hurdles designed to appease people's irrational fears.

I call bullshit on that. Nuclear safety is not to be taken lightly. The reason we haven't had more disasters than we've currently had is precisely because people working in the field take this stuff deeply seriously. And they need to.

What's killing nuclear isn't environmentalists, it's that this stuff is hard, really hard, and it's getting harder over time as more failure scenarios are known.

We haven't really had any disasters, compared to the damage coal and oil do to our environment, and also compared to the semi-regular industrial accidents that happen in the coal/oil industry.

Three Mile Island - how many fatalities? Fukushima - who died? Chernobyl - there should be a Godwin's law about this.

Meanwhile, life expectancy is down, coal fired plants are quite literally poisoning our atmosphere, and oil explosions and accidents kill more people in a decade than nuclear power has over its existence (nuclear power, not nuclear weaponry. Though that's an interesting question - how many people were killed in fire bombings or by fuel-air weapons vs by nukes?)

> Nuclear safety is not to be taken lightly.

Safety in general is not to be taken lightly. But we should assess the relative safety of different technologies fairly. We don't do that with nuclear; we hold it to standards far higher than the ones we enforce for other technologies, even though those other technologies have killed orders of magnitude more people. That is not rational.

> this stuff is hard, really hard, and it's getting harder over time as more failure scenarios are known.

This could be said of any technology. But again, we hold nuclear to far higher standards than we do other technologies that have failure scenarios which have already killed orders of magnitude more people.

Shure, China is atm mostly using a more than 30 year old design bought from france and everyone knows safety is not their primary concern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China#Reactor...

Yes, that French design that has such a horrible safety record in France. Oh wait, it has an excellent record and France is still exporting power from those designs. And I don't think everyone knows that safety is not their primary concern. What other country shoots CEO's in the head when they put citizens at risk with poisoned products or environmental disasters?

Wie already know the flaws of this design, that's why there are newer safer designs like the epr are build or planned in the west. You can drive around in a 30 year old car without problem, but most people would prefer the safety standards oft today. And chinas track record in other parts of the energy business show that shooting that one CEO isn't that big of a help. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_mining_accident...

The problem is probably the newer designs don't have as many successful rollouts. And when spending 10 years and billions, predictability is important. But after Googling around, I do see France has some non-trivial issues with Chinese safety issues.

> Also remember that a key driver of the high cost of nuclear energy is lawsuits based on irrational overestimates of the risk of nuclear energy compared to other energy sources.

Do you have a source for this as the new EPR reactor in finland is aboud three times as expensive as planned?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

> the new EPR reactor in finland

I was actually talking about nuclear energy in US; I'm not familiar with the legal regimes in other countries to know how much of an impact lawsuits have been. France, at least, has been getting the majority of their electricity from nuclear reactors for several decades now, so clearly it is possible to have a saner legal environment.

> is aboud three times as expensive as planned

How experienced is this construction company at building nuclear reactors?

Here in Germany we used a salt mine to dispose of our nuclear waste, which backfired, to say the least. [1]

How big the eventual costs (the article speaks of "at least €4 billion ($5.3 billion), but more likely somewhere between €5 billion and €10 billion") will be is uncertain, and I can't back this up by any real evidence, but my guess is that those who profited from the waste disposal might not be the ones paying for the clean-up.

This all makes me think of the Futurama episode "A Big Piece of Garbage" [2]:

>The others quickly dismiss Leela's concerns that the new garbage ball will return and destroy a future generation. Professor Farnsworth replies that it will not be for hundreds of years, presumably by the year 4000, prompting Fry to say "That's the 20th Century spirit!"

[1]http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-weighs-o...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Big_Piece_of_Garbage

I didn't see any evidence in that article that the waste was causing problems in the salt mine. Why is it considered safer to remove it?

It was deemed that it was going to cause problems in th elong term, that's why it was cdecided to remove the waste and store it somewhere else. You can't really plan ahead for the periods that long.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com