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Comment by dandare | Hacker News Reader

I used to be skeptical about organisations like Greenpeace that were strictly against nuclear power, questioning the logic of a priori refusing any major energy sources: coal, dams and atom. Because hippies don't wear t-shirts from China and don't charge their mobile phones, right? But the situation changed and renewables are reaching price parity with traditional sources of electricity. Then when things like Fukushima happen you see the astronomical costs of the negative externalities in the long term and things look suddenly very different. Now I see that nuclear power is not only an ecological hazard but also a fool's business from the economical point of view.

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> like Fukushima happen you see the astronomical costs of the negative externalities in the long term and things look suddenly very different

Erm, the cost/damage on the whole region (and not just Fukushima) is much higher than the nuclear power part itself. Let's not forget it's a once-a-millenium kind of tsunami that occurred there.

> Now I see that nuclear power is not only an ecological hazard but also a fool's business from the economical point of view

That's the best thing we have, right now. Good luck powering up cities and means of productions with solar & wind, from tomorrow onward.

> Let's not forget it's a once-a-millenium kind of tsunami that occurred there.

Maybe we should stop calling it that. It's now obvious that there was a miscalculation at site surveying stage, no need to hype it up.

> That's the best thing we have, right now.

The environmental record with just two INES scale 1 accidents is poor. As nuclear proliferates to places with even less safety culture and the number of reactors installed reactors grows, so will the catastrophic outcomes.

If nuclear production grows say fivefold worldwide, it's not unreasonable to expect at least fivefold increase of INES 1 incidents. Which means instead of two catastrophes in a 30 years span we'd have 10 or more.

Actually it is unreasonable to expect fivefold increase. Unless the production will grow using 40years old reactors. If you consider environmental records of the nuclear power poor what can you say about other types of power plants which have even poorer record?

It is entirely reasonable to expect that operation in places like (hypothetical) Venezuela, Pakistan or Jordan would be more accident-prone. And that's not accounting for very substantial chance of the sites ending up in warzones.

For example, in my native Belarus on a new plant project they dinged the reactor vessel in installation a couple of times already. Three workers have died in process of construction so far. Can't say I'm looking forward to its operation.

> If you consider environmental records of the nuclear power poor what can you say about other types of power plants which have even poorer record?

I say even coal does not have as long lasting effect when replaced by cleaner tech (e.g. natural gas) as a nuclear fallout site.

Oh we (Lithuania) are well aware of the new construction in Belarus and because it is close to the border and our capital we are not happy about it either.

Coal spreads much more radiation compared to nuclear power plants.

People don't have linear responses to radiation. To simplify if you need 3 mutations in a specific order to cause cancer, if each events as 1/10,000 you get (1/10,000)^3 but if you go to (1/1,000)^3 it's not 10x as dangerous but 1,000x as dangerous.

The problem is, every single time a "extremely rare and unpredictable" nuclear catastrophic event happens, we say the same thing.

The exact reason why we should avoid nuclear in the medium term is that the events that caused, are causing and will keep cause those accidents are all unpredictable. The cost in consequences for our planet is still too high and will remain that high or increase until we will be capable of "de-radioactivize" things

It makes things tricky from a risk and commercial point of view. I used to work on wind farm design and it was as simple as "will the turbine hit something if it falls over?". And turbine topples are extremely rare events.

I can't even imagine the complexities of estimating risk for a reactor design.

"The exact reason why we should avoid nuclear in the medium term is that the events that caused, are causing and will keep cause those accidents are all unpredictable. The cost in consequences for our planet is still too high and will remain that high"

I only wish this was more broadly accepted. Nuclear power should be left to extra-planetary use-cases, because it will probably be the only viable option available up there, and more so because it is such a dirty solution down here.

Nuclear safety is not about predicting causes. It is about considering how to contain what happens, should it happen, even if you cannot imagine a cause for it to happen.

There are three to six hundred year old stones that dot the northern coastline of Japan, telling people not to build below a certain point because of tsunamis. This wasn't a once in a millennium event.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.ht...

Unfortunately, humanity no longer seems wise enough to extend this same concern for future generations.

You misunderstand what a 1 in x event means it is a probability not a clock.

We had 2 1/250 year floods in my village within 5 years - exacerbated by the land owners not maintain the waterways on their property

This is not one event 600 years ago, this is several events over 600+ years where people marked safe areas. 26,000 died in this one but even with a smaller population in 1896 one killed 22,000 people. These are 1:100 year events not 1:1,000 year events and people are really bad about things that happen less frequently than 1:50 years or so.

I didn't misunderstand anything about probability. Japan is among the most seismically active regions in the world and tsunamis and large earthquakes are(in historical terms) a regular occurrence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_historical_tsunamis

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_historical_earthquak...

They don't hem to this probability no matter how you try and frame it.

The term is misleading and leads to poor decision-making

>Let's not forget it's a once-a-millenium kind of tsunami that occurred there.

blaming unpleasant stuff on tsunami in Japan is like blaming "unexpectedly happening winters" in Russia for Russian problems.

Erm, hello ? Japan is aware of tsunami and earthquake risks. There are hundreds of earthquakes every single year, and very few people actually die from any compared to any other country with similar profiles. So when a tsunami suddenly causes massive deaths in Japan, it's not because they were not prepared. It's because it was exceptional.

I'm all for renewables, but I am also happy for nuclear to take up any slack in energy production until such time we can ensure 100% of our energy comes from renewables

While I see where you're coming from, this strategy has a severe downside: once you lose the urgency, I expect conversion to renewables will grind to a halt.

Inertia is a powerful thing.

In that sense it may be more reasonable to skip the nuclear step and invest the necessary billions in renewable infrastructure, not nuclear reactors.

Completely agree, as nuclear won't ramp up in the next decade. i.e. if I have 10 billion USD in the bank I can have that all converted in solar panels or wind turbines in 2 years. A nuclear plant would take 10 years just to get build.

Economically speaking if I go nuclear I need to compete with solar prices 10 years in the future not the current prices.

Ecologically its the same. I invest in solar or wind, I am displacing coal and gas within two years. The nuclear plant will only start helping 8 years later.

Greenpeace is fighting nuclear waste recycling. For me, it is a proof that they are manipulated.

Disclaimer: I have worked at "La Hague France" between 1994 and 1999.

Nuclear waste "recycling" is a bit of a misnomer. If you read the article, the fuel rods, and that is the only part that is being "recycled", is just a small part of the contaminated material that needs to be handled. You're not recycling the reactor rubble, the contaminated water or soil. And reprocessed nuclear fuel is not like recycled glass or aluminum that can be reused an almost infinite number of times - nuclear fission always produces waste products like iodine or cesium, which cannot be turned in to fuel again and need to be disposed of.

Even when you leave out the fuel, dismantling a nuclear reactor is a challenge in itself. Even the "safe" thorium and potential fusion reactors leave highly contaminated ruins behind. Read about the THTR-300 if you're interested. The German AVR reactor is also a dirty mess that nobody knows how to clean up, even though no major nuclear incident happened there.

When thinking of nuclear waste, most people think of spent fuel rods - plutonium and uranium. Those are easy to handle, they're solids, they're comparably small and you put them into molten glass. But storing an entire contaminated reactor building, that we don't know how to do other than do like Chernobyl and just cast the whole thing in concrete.

>Even when you leave out the fuel, dismantling a nuclear reactor is a challenge in itself. Even the "safe" thorium and potential fusion reactors leave highly contaminated ruins behind.

There will be some epic horror stories that will eventually come out about the decommissioning of the USS Enterprise, a 55-year-old ship with eight nuclear reactors.

"You're not recycling the reactor rubble, the contaminated water or soil."

I wonder why is that, why can't all of it be molten and run through enriching turbines. Is it because of too low of a radioactive mass proportion of said material rendering that economically unfeasible?

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