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Comment by legulere | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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...

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

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.

Now compare against an energy technology that is not Coal.

> 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.

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.

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 ?

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

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

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

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.

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?"

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...

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.

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?

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.

> 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)

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?

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

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

Can you back this up?

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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

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

> ... 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...

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.

> > 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.

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

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.

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.

> - 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.

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

> 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.

> 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.

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

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

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.

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...

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.

I'm glad I encountered a honesty oracle!

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?

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...

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

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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