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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

I'll give you an example. I live in Ithaca, NY, not far from some of the richest shale gas deposits in the United States. This town is also ground zero for fracking hatred. Post something awful about fracking, and people will eat that shit up whether it's true or not. I know, because I was one of them.

Then I started dating a hydrogeologist. As luck would have it, her very MS thesis was on fracking. She dispelled rumors left and right: "fracking causes earthquakes!" - actually it's poorly built injection wells and wastewater storage that causes earthquakes; "fracking injects radioactives and other poisons into our groundwater!" - nope, the fluid itself is relatively benign (except for a single phase of high-concentration HF/HCL) and the radioactives are actually pumped UP from the crust, not the other way around. And as much as we hippies like to believe - the 60s/70s never really ended in Ithaca - our town is powered by dirty, dirty coal, not magical fairy dust; natural gas would hugely reduce our CO2 emissions.

Point is, it's fair to be scared. Improper fracking CAN cause earthquakes, it CAN poison groundwater, but it is very obvious where and how it happens, and it can be regulated and prevented.

The only real problems arise when people refuse to reconsider their opinions in the face of facts.

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Just looking at your first point, She dispelled rumors left and right: "fracking causes earthquakes!" - actually it's poorly built injection wells and wastewater storage that causes earthquakes

In your mind fracking is separate from building injection wells and wastewater storage? All of your examples are the reasons why fracking is dangerous. Just because people get confused about whats being pumped in, doesn't make them wrong that 'radioactives' are appearing.

I think you have been duped by the power of the p . . .

Dangerous doesn't mean too dangerous. Nuclear energy is dangerous but any projection of energy use that accommodates growing population and energy usage AND expects carbon reductions AND doesn't include growing nuclear use is simply impossible.

EDIT: Also worth noting that there is a clear correlation between the increase of electronics/battery recycling in the West and lead poisoning cases in Kenyan children where the recycling is done. America cleaned up its sooty and smoggy cities by exporting the freedom to pollute to China and Mexico. No such thing as a free lunch.

Burning fossil fuels in perpetuity is dangerous too.

The point is, fracking can be done safe, it can be done properly. The only reason we see these hyperbolic results in places like Oklahoma is that states that tend to allow fracking just so happen to be the ones that couldn't give a rat's ass about effective and proper regulation.

We've come a long way from rope seat belts, haven't we?

Nuclear power can be done safe, but we also have many examples of it not being done safe. Saying, "well it will be different this time. We will build systems to make corruption, laziness, and dangerous actions impossible!" is believing in a pipe dream.

We have come a long way from Chernobyl. Most of the people posting here probably weren't even alive when it happened. Nuclear power is so well-controlled (unless you build reactors on earthquake hotspots or tsunami zones, I mean c'mon Japan) that you can't even use regular statistical models because the only probable risks are human. Reactors are really, really well-designed these days to seal themselves off in the (super-rare) case of a critical malfunction. The real risk with nuclear right now is the boogeyman fears of a meltdown keeping us from updating our ancient reactors.

So I ask: how do we provide energy to a rapidly growing global population without surging carbon emissions using readily deployable technology? Renewables might work - if people stopped having kids for a while - but aside from truly revolutionary advances in energy efficiency, generation, and storage, we are left with an unfortunate but undeniable fact: we need nuke.

What about leaks (almost common in old plants) and the nuclear waste storage problem?

There is plenty of energy out there. Recent advances in solar and wind technology make it within reach.

Nuclear is simply not an economical solution.

Exactly as you said: old plants. We don't update them as we should to make them as safe as they can be. That's not an engineering problem, that's a political problem.

Waste storage? Same story. We have plenty of useless desert in the US, but people don't want to be anywhere remotely near them.

Recent advances in solar and wind technology might make it within reach...if we were dealing with 1-2 billion people, not close to 10 billion people in our lifetimes. All of these people want to live like we do: they want to eat meat, they want light at the flick of a switch, they want heat at the turn of a dial. Assuming prices will go down and efficiency will go up to match skyrocketing demand is greatly misguided.

Not to mention, extracting and refining the rare earths necessary for a lot of these devices is unfathomably ruinous to the environment, and recycling is just as bad (see my other comment about lead poisoning in Kenyan kids).

You have brought up 2 political problems and 1 technological fantasy. Nothing about economics. Nuclear is fine.

I don't understand the nuclear waste "problem". Anything that is radioactive for thousands of years is also not very radioactive because it has such a long half-life.

More concerning would be the chemical toxicity hazard, but that is void because nuclear waste is vitrified (turned in to glass), which makes it extremely chemically inert.

Then there's the possibility of recycling the spent fuel (waste?) in fast spectrum reactors, if we can work out how to do that reliably / economically.

It's radioactive for that long because it /is/ waste. We haven't finished extracting the valuable energy from it yet. (that's what 'waste reduction' (breeder) reactors are supposed to do; concentrate up the useful stuff and leave most of it clean enough to either decay really quickly, or so slowly that it's not harmful.)

> It's radioactive for that long because it /is/ waste.

I'm not sure what you're saying here? How does being waste make it radioactive?

If it still contains valuable energy it isn't waste. By virtue of the fact that nobody wants it I'm assuming that energy can't be extracted economically at this time?

Nuclear capacity globally 386 GW in 2016 up from 375.5 GW at the end of 2010.

"By the end of this year, cumulative global installed solar photovoltaic capacity will surpass 310 GW, compared with just 40 GW at the end of 2010"

Which of those looks like it's producing the futures capacity?

One thing that really ought to be stressed about Chernobyl is that it was a really shitty reactor design (probably just about the most unsafe reactor design ever) manned by poorly-trained and incompetent people.

With the outlier of Chernobyl, nuclear energy has a very good safety record. Shoddy and dangerous Soviet engineering has a very bad safety record. The operative variable here is shoddy and dangerous Soviet engineering.

You wouldn't say that because Eastern Bloc cars would have ludicrously awful[0] results in a crash test, therefore it's unsafe to travel by car. You wouldn't say that the safety record of the Ilyushin Il-62[1] proves all passenger planes are unsafe. You wouldn't say the combat record of the T-72 means the Army should immediately retire that useless deathtrap M1 Abrams.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF4phDLfGF4

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilyushin_Il-62#Incidents_and_a...

There are inherent dangers to nuclear power, as with cars, passenger planes and combat vehicles. However, these dangers are all well-understood and easily mitigable. In the Soviet Union safety was not a priority or oftentimes even a consideration, in America it is.

Not only that, but nuclear power is not remotely even the most potentially dangerous form of power generation. That easily, easily belongs to hydropower. The Banqiao Dam disaster[2] killed 171,000 people.

But I'm not worried about hydropower and neither should you, if you live in the first world. Dams are, inherently, incredibly dangerous. But we understand the dangers, and we know how to make dams so that the danger is reduced to near-zero. That a dam built in Mao-era China was unsafe doesn't mean that it's impossible to make a safe dam.

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

FINALLY! Someone who understands the reality of the situation and backs it up with FACTS!

If people weren't so terrified of nuclear energy by movies like Silkwood or TV shows like The Simpsons they might actually look past their own emotional hinderances and do some trivial comparisons, like, say, the extraction-to-power-generation death rates of nuclear energy versus coal and oil (not to mention air pollution) of the last 50 years and come to a simple conclusion: nuclear energy is perfectly safe if you do it right.

One way to look at media like Silkwood is that one of the differences that lets nuclear power be safe in the U.S. even if it wasn't safe in the U.S.S.R. is a well-functioning nuclear regulatory, press, and legal system that lets people act on knowledge of problems and defects, and allows Feynman's hope that "reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled" to be better borne out in practice.

These media strongly questioned those institutions based on stories of cases in which they seem to have failed.

If operators of nuclear power plants manage to reduce the effectiveness and autonomy of the institutions that are working to guarantee safety, the situation gets more like the Soviet Union. One way of thinking about this is that the most useful lesson of the 1970s anxiety about the nuclear industry is less "nuclear power is dangerous!" and more "how effective and independent are our institutions, and how do we know?".

So what do we do with the waste that takes 10,000+ years to become safe, given that the average corporation has a lifespan of less than a hundred years?

Modern LFTR reactors produce almost no waste and low grade at that. Current stockpiles of nuclear "waste" are in fact immensely valuable resources as fuel stock to modern reactors.

Burn the waste in breeder reactors.

With the outlier of Chernobyl, nuclear energy has a very good safety record.

Fukushima is another example showing that fission power is dangerous and expensive - because of the safety precautions, insurance, disaster recovery and cleanup costs, and worse it shifts those costs and dangers from the power plant to the host country and surrounding countries. It's far more expensive in those terms than most other ways of generating power save coal (which has worse problems), maybe it should be part of the mix but only if there are no simpler alternatives like hydro, wind, wave and solar.

Fusion will be far better when we work out how to contain it. It's amazing to think of the progress we could make if energy was almost free.

Come one, way more people died in the earthquake. Its not great what happened at Fukushima, but it was hardly a disaster.

Accidental deaths is a very poor measure of cost to society. For example coal kills far more with pollution than with accidents, and fission disasters render huge swathes of land uninhabitable for decades.

> unless you build reactors on earthquake hotspots or tsunami zones, I mean c'mon Japan

Prior to the Fukushima disaster, how many proponents of nuclear power considered it to be an example of a nuclear plant that was too dangerous to operate, and how many treated it as an example of modern, safe nuclear power and dismissed criticism as anti-nuclear fearmongering?

> how do we provide energy ...? Renewables might work - if people stopped having kids for a while

It seems like you haven't done the math. I have. You're ridiculously wrong.

US marketed energy consumption per capita is 9.5 kW (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co...). That's 9.5 square meters of sunlight. If we pessimistically assume that we can only site solar panels on land (29% of Earth's surface) and only 10% of that, and that we're only using the currently common 16%-efficient polysilicon photovoltaic panels (rather than, say, solar thermal collectors or multijunction cells), then we receive enough solar energy for 60 billion people at current US levels of consumption, according to units(1):

    You have: circlearea(earthradius) * 1000 W/m^2 * 29% * 10% * 16% / 9.5 kW
    You want: billion
	* 62.281752
	/ 0.016056067

That's about eight times Earth's current human population.

Is it too costly? Currently, photovoltaic modules cost about US$0.50 per watt (see http://www.solarserver.com/service/pvx-spot-market-price-ind...), so, for everyone to consume as much marketed energy as USAns, we're talking about an investment of about US$4800 per person, or about US$160 per person per year, assuming a 30-year lifespan for the panels, even if costs didn't drop further. That's only about 1.6% of the nominal world GDP of about US$10k per year per person (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...).

And that's just solar photovoltaic. EGS (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_geothermal_system) and oceanic lithium (see https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_172.shtml) are two other energy resources of similar magnitude to solar photovoltaic, but they're being developed more slowly — photovoltaic is practical today.

Your comment would have been reasonable ten years ago, when solar PV was still expensive. The facts have changed. When the facts change, I change my opinion. When are you going to change yours?

Erratum: that's US$0.50 per peak watt. Although capacity factors vary by latitude and mounting (electronics are now cheap enough that some new utility-scale solar PV boosts its capacity factor with heliostats), a typical capacity factor is 20%, which means:

- US$24000 of panels per person, or

- US$800 per person per year, assuming 30-year lifespan, which is

- 8% of nominal world GDP of US$10k per year per person.

Worse, though, is that this reduces the carrying capacity calculation to some 12 billion, which is a number we might actually reach, although not soon. We're projected to reach 10 billion in 2083 by the UNFPA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth

What's actually going to happen, though, is that PV prices will start dropping again; the majority of marketed energy consumption will be from photovoltaic cells starting sometime in the 2020s; energy prices will drop well below where they are now; we'll increase our per capita marketed energy consumption far above current rich-world usage, but much of that will be thermal, not electrical; and we'll use a lot more than 10% of the land area for solar energy gathering.

Coal power can be done safe, but we also have many examples of it not being done safe. Saying, "well it will be different this time. We will build systems to make corruption, laziness, and dangerous actions impossible!" is believing in a pipe dream.

Nuclear power can be done safe, but we also have many examples of it not being done safe

You could replace "Nuclear power" with quite a lot of things we do these days. Such as "Driving" or "Home construction".

We made airliner travel safe, we can make nuke plants safe.

Despite the laziness and corruption, human fallibility and mistakes, the fast majority of nuclear power is safe now.

We don't have to do it differently in the future ("this time"), we just need to do it marginally better over time. Every new power plant built, whether goal or gas or nuclear, or solar / wind, is marginally better than the previous design because of what we've learned.

Coal has killed way more than nuclear energy so far. Please check data before having an opinion.

Many things can be done safe, but safe is often a route that's not taken because it's much more expensive.

What about the absurd amount of water, an increasingly scarce resource, used by fracking?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150915135827.h...

250 B gallons in, 210 B gallons out. So net-net 40B gallons for the entire industry between 2005 and 2014. Call it 40,000 swimming pools worth.

The "out" is completely treatable.

"Large though those numbers seem, the study calculates that the water used in fracking makes up less than 1 percent of total industrial water use nationwide." - FTA.

"Gasland" is a bad movie.

Now, in some places, the available water is sufficiently short that it probably should not be used for industrial use at all.

Relative to say, coal, Nuclear is anything but dangerous. The availability heuristic strikes again.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...

Nuclear is safe, affordable and the only alternative to non-renewables that doesn't require us to drastically reduce our energy usage. Because realistically, we all know that's just not going to happen.

Not to mention, throughout the 20th century, we in the first world reaped the benefits of readily available energy to drastically boost our living conditions. To deny that benefit to developing countries by restricting them to wind solar and hydro would be immoral.

Source for American recycling being done in Kenya leading to lead poisoning?

I live here and this is the first I'm hearing of it.

The only real problems arise when people refuse to reconsider their opinions in the face of facts.

But your fact is just another one's opinion. We have had ample examples in the last fifty years where "science" has been abused with a for-profit motive (tobacco and nutrition are useful examples, as is this article).

It's not fair to blame "hippies" for ignoring "science", unless you're also willing to blame media, politics and business alike for overstating the "certainty" of scientific knowledge.

It is quite fair to blame hippies for ignoring science. Propaganda works on everyone. It is nobody's job but your own to do due diligence.

Yes, the media, politicians and so on has a tendency to proclaim falsehoods as facts - nutrition advice and policy being a great example - but our legal system requires a modicum of intent to assign liability, just as society accepts that requirement for blame. (Blah blah criminal negligence other exceptions I fucking hate how defensively I have to write on the internet these days just to get a point across without leaving a tiny detail open for someone to slam for karma).

>But your fact is just another one's opinion.

That is a very dangerous perspective. Our understanding of the universe is always changing. But eschewing accepted science without a compelling alternative because it could be wrong is a path to nowhere but President Trump.

> Our understanding of the universe is always changing. But eschewing accepted science without a compelling alternative because it could be wrong is a path to nowhere but President Trump.

Well. To be fair, it's a path also to President Hillary. Or President Cruz. Or President Sanders. It seems our politics is rife with science-ignorance and science-ignoring. I don't think it's particularly constructive to call out Trump as being different.

I say Trump in particular because of the tendency these days to see that name in uncomfortably close proximity with the words "post-truth era." And, to be fair to the man, I am less concerned with what he says than how his supporters react, and what that means for humanity's future.

> Point is, it's fair to be scared. Improper fracking CAN cause earthquakes, it CAN poison groundwater, but it is very obvious where and how it happens, and it can be regulated and prevented.

Everywhere I've seen fracking it's been almost completely unregulated. The US MMS (Minerals Management) has been called a "culture of corruption" by whistleblowers: http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/10/14/oil.whistleblower/index.htm...

What makes you think fracking would be regulated in any reasonable manner, given our current bought and paid for government?

Aside from (impoverished) pockets in the Southern Tier, upstate-and-downstate New Yorkers generally approve of Gov. Cuomo's moratorium on fracking, not to mention the fact that some of the best shale gas deposits are underneath NYCs watersheds. There's no chance fracking will get a green light in this state without some pretty hardcore regulation.

Not to mention, the kinds of folks that tend to "buy and pay for" our government live and work in the tri-state area. Don't expect them to risk their health and property values anytime soon.

Equating fracking risk with poor regulation is like assuming moneyed resistance to fracking in NY will work everywhere.

Don't let the boogeyman scare you away from cold, hard, scientific fact: hydraulic fracturing, when done properly, is safe and cost-effective. The regulatory culture surrounding it has a huge effect - nobody's denying that - but the real risks are not scientific or engineering: they're political.

Nearly all frack sites involve two types of landowner - the people who own surface rights and the people who own mineral rights. This doesn't address injection wells but that triangular ( surface, mineral and fracker ) relationship "regulates" things pretty well.

Since the film "Gasland", all manner of untrue things are flung at fracking. IMO, a grain of salt is in order.

The stuff down the hole is much more dangerous than the fracking process - there is (maybe) HS gas, possibly radioisotopes, pressure, other stuff. Fracking is simply a part of the completion process of drilling.

That's a very strange form of argument. First, you are arguing that fracking doesn't cause these things, then you go on to list the specific constituents of fracking activity that cause them.

Then, you're saying that fracking doesn't have to cause these problems, but the fact is that it has. So, it's the fracking industry itself that has given fracking a bad name.

In general, it sounds like industry PR and misdirection.

Did you know that driving a car will result in your hurtling through the windshield at 70mph and wrapping your spine around a tree...

...if you drive very fast and don't wear a seatbelt?

As I have said exhaustively (because I am getting quite tired of repeating myself), the process of fracking - which has been done hundreds of times to no ill effect - is not inherently dangerous or error-prone. No more so than deep-sea drilling (anything but Deepwater Horizon come to mind? Also, another case of underregulation leading to calamity) or nuclear energy (which is extremely safe but evokes an emotional fear response; fun fact: almost 200,000 survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings are still alive today![1]). It is the lack of effective regulation that results in pollution. I don't know how I'm particularly misdirected by PR given that I fully support NYS Gov. Cuomo's fracking moratorium, precisely because fracking companies don't want to deal with the very regulations that make fracking safe.

Side note: most of upstate NY's roads are pretty terrible. But just south of the border in PA - where fracking is ongoing - the roads are all new and well-built, because they are needed to truck the natural gas away safely, so everyone there has safer roads as a result. Can't just pick the pros and cons you like.

[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/08/01/japan-hi...

The car analogy isn't very solid because most drivers are invested in their own safety as opposed to the fracking industry which only cares about environmental damage insomuch as it represents a financial liability. You claim that fracking can be done safely with good regulations, and I appreciate the nuance in your response, but for the most part, fracking proponents tend to be categorically opposed to regulation because additional expense is inherent to the nature of regulation (it's always cheaper to do nothing instead of adding extra steps for safety, clean up and proper disposal)

Then I would argue the biggest threat to safe and effective fracking is Saudi Arabia. As long as fuel prices are low, people are more willing to cut corners to make a profit. If prices are high, the added costs of effective regulation are an easier sell.

Otherwise, you make a great point.

Active fracking projects in the US have dwindled to low levels thanks to low oil prices driven by Saudi Arabia maintaining production at current rates. This is a well-established fact.[0]

Your claim on the other hand is just an opinion at this point as I have seen nothing that indicates low oil prices lead to worse practices and procedures among domestic fracking firms.

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/dec/07/opec-plan-k...

>driving a car will result in your hurtling through the windshield

Specious.

>I am getting quite tired of repeating myself

You're missing my point. You're claiming that fracking can be done safely, but I'm not arguing that in the way that you think. What I'm saying is that there are frequently externalities brought about by the manner in which the fracking industry actually operates vs how you claim they could operate. Doubtless it's cheaper for them. Maybe the problem is that fracking can be done safely, but it's just not cost-desirable or even profitable to do so. I don't know. But you can't go jumping on people's heads for acknowledging the obvious: fracking can be dangerous.

>fracking is not inherently dangerous or error-prone.

What do you mean by "inherently"? If stringent regulations are required to constrain frackers from causing massive amounts of damage, then it seems to me that it is inherently dangerous by definition. This is where you seem to be mixing things up, as with your nuclear example. None of these things are "inherently safe". They are inherently dangerous if not conducted in a carefully prescribed manner, which is why the stringent regulation you advocate is required. So, you're really saying two different things here and trying to figure out why you're not getting your point across.

Anyway, therein lies the danger that people fear: even with the required regulation, mistakes can have and have had dire consequences. It's not unreasonable for people to have concerns.

So, It just comes off as a little disingenuous to exclaim that everyone has it wrong on fracking when the current reality is that they don't.

It is both cost-effective and desirable to have it done safely. There's risk of EPA, of the well owner and of the surface landowner. The whole process is extremely technical and among its practitioners, safety is a key consideration.

Then why are we having this discussion?

To the limit of my ability to tell, there's what amounts to a horror campaign about the evils of fracking going on out there. There's this film, "Gasland' that slings a bunch of ... inadequate information.

So, there have been no fracking accidents, no legitimate evidence of increased seismic activity, no contaminated water, no added expense for frackers to take extra precaution, contain runoff, etc.?

There's no technical reason that fracking can be dangerous or has been?

It's actually sort of unclear what the status is. The problem is that "Gasland" has muddied the water, so you spend so much time vetting sources that it's slow going.

There is a movie from .. 1940? titled "Tulsa" where Robert Preston's character "invents" fracking - a column of water and dynamite. It got safer :)

I'm sure there are incidents. But it's not like an incident goes without recourse. I think there's one case where a formation in Wyoming is physically entangled with the water table. That operation should never have been approved ( and yes, these things have to be approved ). After a decade of reading, that's the only remotely credible one I know of. Generally, water is at, say 400 feet and oil/gas/shale is at 10,000 feet.

Even then, while it's not easy to clean it up, it's doable.

J. Larry Nichols is a founder of and on the board of Devon Energy, one of the companies that pioneered fracking for shale. He's on record saying "show me one case where fracking caused environmental damage."

But, of course, he's not considered reliable by people interested in environmentalism, usually. And I haven't found a demonstration (other than the one) that proves him wrong yet. I'm a lot more concerned that oil in general will get the USA v. RJR treatment which sets off some sort of scarcity cascade that could destabilize the Third World.

IMO, gas at the pump ougtha be $10 a gallon and $5 of that should go to alts research but I doubt that's possible.

IMO, and this is also just IMO, the whole thing is a proxy for AGW fear because nat. gas is a bridge technology while we wait for Elon Musk to save us from fossil fuels. But that's psychlogizing, really.

Fracking is a pretty high-energy activity. But most of the fuss seems at least to be mostly confirmation bias by both sides.

Are you referring to the kinds of "regulations" that led to the entire Gulf of Mexico becoming contaminated with oil?

It doesn't matter that it CAN be done safely. No one in their right minds trusts either the companies or the government not to eventually cut corners and make severe mistakes.

FWIW, the entire oil industry knew that BP was a ticking time bomb. They were (in)famous in Houston for flouting every safety regulation and best practice the industry had ever come up with.

This is why, post-Deepwater, BP wasn't allowed into the club of Gulf producers pooling mutual aid and research efforts toward safer deepwater drilling. Everyone knew they were reckless.

Had Deepwater Horizon been a Shell or Exxon operation, there never would have been a crisis.

Not surprised by misinformation; people rarely fact-check posts that support their political position.

On the other hand it's hard to get responsible regulation when the dispute is so polarized. Unbiased information can be harder to find. You get one extreme or the other. So a delay doesn't seem so bad.

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