The big problem in my mind is not that nuclear power can't be safe but that I don't see anything to give me confidence that it can regulated to ensure that it actually is in practice.
Compared to oil spills ("oops, we grounded our tanker") and dam failures ("maintenance, lolwut?") a lot of different things needed to come together for the Chernobyl disaster to happen and the runners up, (3-mile, Fukushima) are downright benign by comparison.
As long as we don't get complacent and half-ass things I have no problem with nuclear power.
Look at the disaster of Long-Term Capital Management from the financial industry as an example, where a presumed ten sigma event almost wiped out the whole western financial system.
http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.fi/2007/05/11000000000000...
These nuclear reactors are built with the same underlying principles and risk-management profiles. There's always the element of human error; you can't over-engineer something you did not foresee. In addition to that you have the enormous profit incentives from running nuclear power. These incentives can overwhelm the incentives for safety, or lead to disregard of warnings where profit potential would be compromised if warnings were attended to.
It's human, therefore it's hard to ever sleep completely sound knowing that these constructions are running on the planet.
Fukushima didn't just happen because one mistake was made either. It happened because a long string of mistakes and disregard of safety happened. Want to bet it doesn't happen again? It's hard to bet against human nature...
Now, obviously no catastrophic event in a nuclear power plant (or any other system engineered for safety) happens because of a single mistake. If it did that would be a huge error in the systems design. For a catastrophe to happen, several layers of safety systems need to fail at the same time.
I think its possible to engineer systems that are safe enough even in the presence of human factors. Modern reactor designs for example are a lot safer than what we had in Fukushima. But convincing you of this would probably take a lot more text than fits in HN discussion, so let's just disagree on this point.
How are financial people even calculating that kind of rarity?
I remember seeing a recent article here on HN about a guy that lost a ton of (someone else's) money playing with oil contracts. He went on about how he diligently planned for "huge" failures, such as a drop of up to 30 percent in the price of oil.
I don't think it's fair to bring in finance. Natural disasters and nuclear reactors are far more well behaved and understood.
They don't properly, and that is the problem. A lot of it had to do with creating models that do not reflect reality. They worked fine until extraordinary circumstances occur under which they break down. A well known mistake is assuming a normal distribution for financial returns. In reality this greatly underestimates the likelihood and magnitude of extreme moves that can cause catastrophic losses. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book "The Black Swan" discusses this in great detail. The bottom line is essentially that a move more extreme than what you anticipated is going to happen eventually.
LTCM made the mistake of neglecting the impact of changing correlations. The thought they had outsmarted the market by eliminating risk from their portfolio. But in times of financial turmoil, correlations of risky assets tend to increase. If your carefully constructed and hedged portfolio does not take this into account, you may be exposed to much more risk than you intended. This is precisely what happend to them. The fund was bailed out by a group of large banks, and their bets did eventually pay off, but the temporary losses were far beyond what their models had anticipated.
What is this cascade event?
Seriously? This ludicrous hyperbole does not belong in a thread where others are discussing the issue in good faith.
That is like saying that exploding all the ice cream factories would lead to continents being covered in continental ice sheets.
Yes, there are some risks - but they are very local, and do not last a long time. I would claim a lone oil tanker is an equivalent environmental risk to a nuclear plant. And look how much oil production we have operating in the oceans.
I think it's fair to say, we've accepted certain level of risk to get our power.
Please don't overstate risks. We are living on a planet whose oceans are dying, whose atmosphere is being clogged by CO2 ... nuclear power is mostly a benevolent technology. It creates very little waste, whose side-effects we can control. Unlike, say ,CO2. Or an oil spill.
Yes, there are sometimes mistakes - but please understand - no matter how the media spins it (because disaster new sell) they really are not that horrific when compared to other things that happen constantly.
The world is already radioactive: People are constantly bombarded by radiation. Like a poster below already mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
15,894 people died as a result of the earthquake and tsunami.
By all accounts, Fukushima was a relatively benign event.
Only 31 people died during the Chernobyl meltdown, according to its wiki page.
The nice thing about an earthquake or tsunami is that they kill and then go away.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
And the definitely largest impact in indirect deaths with Fukushima came from the emotion-based decision to shut down other nuclear reactors, even if there was nothing wrong with them. This lead to electricity shortage and lack of air conditioning, which killed dozens or hundreds (mostly elderly people in hospitals or similar care, who suffered heart attacks in the summer heat).
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-07-12/heatstroke...
Total deaths from Chernobly, including cancers is expected to be around 4000. That represents approximately a 3% increase in cancer risk to some 600,000 people.
Outside of the capped reactor building itself, nothing around Chernobyl is "intensely radioactive".
You and, going by Chernobyl's fallout distribution, everyone else within a radius of roughly 2000 km.
Looking on a map, for me this includes Chernobyl itself, the fallout of which is still measurable around here and contaminates dozens of forests to the point that mushrooms and game from there is considered inedible, and everything else between such stable, wealthy nations as Estonia, Tunisia and Syria.
No, I can't really say I'm confident in peoples' abilities to keep nuclear reactors out of harm's way.
The radioactivity of granite mined decades ago and used to build buildings is still measurable using modern sensing devices. "Measurable" is a pretty bad threshold to use.
> contaminates dozens of forests to the point that mushrooms and game from there is considered inedible
"Considered" by whom? What are the actual levels? How do they compare to the radioactivity of other foods?
From what I can tell, the vast majority of the damage from nuclear accidents is not caused by the accident itself but the radiation-paranoid overreaction to it.
German and EU authorities.
> What are the actual levels? How do they compare to the radioactivity of other foods?
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/hohe-radioaktive-werte-wil...
Legal levels are <400 Bq/kg for baby food and 600 Bq/kg for other foods; contamination in these cases ranges from 1000 to 10000 Bq/kg.
The FDA apparently doesn't even bother with regulating allowable Potassium-40 levels due to this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert - Recommended reading, has a handy table. Fukushima doesn't even register as dangerous in there, equivalent to about 3 full CT scans.
Data from Chernobyl is scarce, but I'd suspect 4x that value due to more retained isotopes.
[1] http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/ComplianceManuals/CompliancePolicyG...
"Fine" in the sense of "just below the limit of 1200". Even by FDA standards, 10000 Bq/kg Cs-137 is extremely high.
As if that will ever stop happening.
On a less snarky level: in a complex system (like basically any large-scale power generation scheme) we can't separate the underlying technology from the petty failings and foibles of the luckless human beings (quite often largely or entirely non-technical) saddled with the awful responsibility of having to manage it. And most especially not their time-tested propensity to sweep things under the rug and cover one's ass at the first sign of trouble (or even undue complication).
That's why we need to choose technologies which are resilient to human failure - not, implicitly, reliant and utterly dependent on human perfection to keep them from tipping over.
Your point remains valid, I just wish our governments were better at avoiding regulatory capture so we could trust them to do their job at this.
Show me where I can signup to have eg Toshiba 4s in my back yard and I'll sign today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
FWIW I have written to my MP and said this.
Wind is already cheaper than nuclear in the US, and our fleet will probably start being turned down over the next decade due to it [1] It's also evident in Europe [2].
[1] http://midwestenergynews.com/2015/05/01/exelon-we-have-to-ha...
[2] http://cleantechnica.com/2013/11/05/nuclear-prices-market-gr...
There's quite a bit of activity in that area right now, with companies like TerraPower, Thorcon, Flibe Energy, Moltex, and Terrestrial Energy bringing new nuclear designs to the marketplace. Thorcon believes its reactors will produce power for as little as two cents per KWH.
All of these new designs will be meltdown proof, and they don't need to be sited near water.
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/hawaii-co-op-solarcity-ink-d...
14.5 cents/kwh is huge? And that's with existing battery costs, not taking into account Tesla's Gigafactory ramping up.
"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."
So, this is exactly what I said solar is good for, balancing out a bit of peak load, with no significant impact on the baseline. Not likely to impact Hawaii's around 88% carbon based energy production. It's one thing to install enough batteries to shift 13 MW of electricity by a few hours. It's another thing entirely to generate and store enough power to completely remove carbon sources. According to that source, Hawaii has a total capacity of 2.3GW. As far as I'm aware, nobody is even considering that as a near-term possibility for stored renewables. Also note that Hawaii is probably one of the better locations for solar, and things get grim the more northerly or overcast your area is. Also, those batteries store 52MWh, the Gigafactory will have an annual output of batteries with total capacity in the tens of GWhs, while Hawaii uses about 10TWh annually, which is over 27 GWh per day average. I can't find a source for how much of that would be used at various times of day, and unsure of the math for how much battery capacity would be needed to take variable sunlight throughout the day and make it last overnight to the next morning, but I expect you're at leas looking at two orders of magnitude larger than the project you linked. And that doesn't give you much of a buffer in case of a storm blocking out the solar power for even a day, which admittedly is less of a problem in Hawaii than elsewhere. You've still got to either provide enough battery power to hold out until generation exceeds consumption again, or you need enough solar panels that you can generate all the power you need even on cloudy days, and simply disable a large portion of them when it is sunny and the batteries are full.
Either way, you'd need every battery the Gigafactory produced for anywhere from a year to a decade, just to maintain reliable power in Hawaii alone. That would be an insane upfront cost without even factoring in solar panels. And those batteries need to be replaced as they lose capacity, so you have to divide that cost over a finite time.
Source: http://energy.hawaii.gov/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/EnergyFa...
[0] Actually it might as the cheaper it gets, the more it drives out reliable baseload generation, which is bad.
Everyone gets a subsidy.
That said, if nuclear can help us get rid of coal faster, I'm fine with it as a transitional technology. Because coal really needs to die. But I'd rather replace it with wind and solar. Or maybe Thorium, if that actually works (any progress there?).
They will be extremely safe, including being completely meltdown proof. They also represent no threat of weapons proliferation.
Although the focus is on China, this article touches on many other developments: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/542526/china-details-next...
But we're not utilizing this resource for civilian purposes. Not even slightly.
We should reinstate the draft. Not everybody has to fight, but everyone should serve their country. And, for example, perhaps a few years doing cyber defense for the Air Force will be seen as a more efficient pipeline into tech jobs than college or coding boot camps.
No, we should not.
Not even our own military wants to reinstate the draft. They prefer the quality of relatively few dedicated volunteers over a quantity of people who don't want to be there.
We have a word for it: conscription. Along with that comes a bunch of people making a bunch of money, little of which goes into my pocket. I'm going to pass on that generous offer, thanks.
This is not only true for nuclear power, but also for oil spills. The Deepwater Horizon disaster happened because BP cut corners. Fukushima happened because the company ignored warnings. Maybe we just can't leave these kind of things in the hands of big corporations.
But if there's really no organization capable of handling this responsibility, then maybe we shouldn't use these technologies on this scale at all.
"...the reality is that five years later, radiobiological consequences of Fukushima are practically negligible - no one has died from the event, and is it extraordinarily unlikely that anyone will do so in future."
Because if not, it doesn't seem like Fukushima is really a disaster you can point to and say, "This is why nuclear is bad."
I'd love to have numbers, like is it 100km^2?
I looked but couldn't find any sources backing up your claim about geiger counter scandals, so my only advice is to be skeptical of things you read on both sides.
Of course it's dumb to ignore warnings that nuclear power plants can cause massive amounts of damage, but there are also over 400 active nuclear reactors.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/japan-e...
Speaking of the latter, no matter how you generate electricity, the electricity itself is dangerous; if that isn't made safe and regulated, you have problems. Explosions, fires, electrocutions.