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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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.

"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.

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.

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