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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

In other words nuclear never killed anybody apart from the ones it killed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...

I'm no expert on Chernobyl or power generation. But I think Chernobyl was the result of under-investment and poor management, whereas many of the deaths from coal are an unavoidable consequence of burning coal. Hence, you can say nuclear is safer as long as it's managed well.

Chernobyl was the result of turning off all safety mechanisms and running the reactor outside of its design range to see what would happen.

That was more-or-less my impression.

Edit: See https://www.damninteresting.com/chernobyl/

"But I think Chernobyl was the result of under-investment and poor management"

Chernobyl was extremely poorly engineered, Soviet Union style. Its major flaw was no containment vessel.

Even then, it took real effort to make it fail, and it was all totally unnecessary. It was probably the worst testing-related disaster in history.

The other major flaw of RBMK reactors is a dangerously high positive void coefficient of reactivity, which self reinforces the nuclear reaction in case of a loss of coolant accident.

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

Isn't the point that even with the current mixture of managment, it's safer? However, I don't know if these numbers include the long-term risk from storing/processing the spent fuel.

Yes, we've demonstrated that you can basically mismanage plants into meltdown, and even then nuclear still ends up killing fewer people.

Over a period of 50 years, you can mismanage a couple of plants and still kill fewer people. But not the entire industry.

I don't know what you are trying to say.

50 years of operation of hundreds of plants. We could have had a repeat of all of the accidents every year and it would still be one of the safest alternatives.

Heck, we could have Chernobyl every year, and even based on the current worst case estimates of reduced life expectancy and counting every one of them as a death, we'd still not compensate for 1 Banqiao failure, or more than 1-2 years worth of coal.

But we're not having a Chernobyl every year. What we are having is vast numbers of preventable deaths due to other types of power generation.

We're talking millions dead over the last 50 years due to other types of plants.

I think you have to be careful here. It's entirely unclear how small dose exposure over long times damage humans. There might be a threshold effect: Some people speculated that low doses actually help, as they trigger the DNA self-repair systems. Slightly more, and that self-repair can't help anymore. So 1 Chernobyl might be fine for people further way, let's say, in the US, 2 or 10 or ... and you suddenly get a lot of Cancer deaths.

If you look at what medicine deemed as safe, the limits were reduced every couple of years.

I'm not saying you are wrong - I actually want to believe this statistic, but has anyone actually compiled the data to back this up?

Specifically - "we could have Chernobyl every year ... we'd still not compensate for more than 1-2 years worth of coal"

Where is it managed well?

I have no idea. I don't even know if it is practically possible to manage well enough to guarantee zero disasters.

But there are many nuclear plants around the world that have operated with no problems. As I said, I'm no expert.

new design exist that in case of disaster self contains under most conditions, trouble is it's very hard to obtain certifications needed for operation today as opposed to decades ago, so we're mostly stuck with old designs.

The UK seems pretty good at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Ki...

by design already. all recent reactors have containment tanks to prevent radioactive leakage in a meltdown event.

I think the important difference is killing people when running as intended, versus killing people when disasters occur. In a way, a Nulcear power plant is similar to dam; when the dam breaks, it's a serious disaster, but as long as it runs as intended, humans aren't really at risk.

Yes, except that dam disasters have killed a lot more people than nuclear disasters.

It only kills in case of a serious incident. Incidents are rare. Coal pollution and deaths are guaranteed

That's not true. Coal pollution and deaths are guaranteed mainly by economic disincentives to using clean coal technologies. Even mercury and CO2 emissions could be captured. But then, that would likely make solar the clear choice.

There is no clean coal. Coal mining alone produces environmental disasters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_co...

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Coal_mining_disasters

Carbon capture and storage technologies also lead to 50..91% increased electricity costs.

http://www.ekopolitan.com/climate/ccs-five-reports-realistic...

Coal vs nuclear just isn't an argument worth making.

Clean coal and clean fission are arguably about as likely, and would be about as expensive.

Why bother, when you have solar?

"Why bother, when you have solar?"

Because solar is intermittent, and isn't practical at all in many parts of the world. The true environmental impact of nuclear is also arguably less, since solar requires a lot of space per watt produced by comparison.

Next-gen nuclear reactor designs from Thorcon Power, Terrestrial and others are very near to perfectly safe, and also produce much less long-term nuclear waste than current designs. There will be an ongoing need for clean, high-density electricity sources.

> Because solar is intermittent, and isn't practical at all in many parts of the world.

The solution to that is simple, use less power at night. I.e. don't make so much aluminum when there is no sun or wind. We could decide as a society to trade a few percent of our wealth for using much less coal and nuclear if we wanted (and if our society were organized in a rational fashion).

Also: don't heat with electricty, but use e.g. solar thermal or geothermal power.

Night isn't the only source of solar intermittency, overcast also has a large effect. Solar also isn't cost effective at higher latitudes. When people are freezing to death, your simplistic approaches won't appeal much.

Efficiency is great and should be encouraged. We still need increasing amounts of reliable, plentiful and cheap energy going forward. You may be willing to accept a diminishing standard of living, most are not.

Soon batteries will be able to handle that. Used Tesla batteries, for example.

Because solar is largely unsuitable for base load power stations. Only solar thermal with molten salt storage or a gas pipe nearby to run the turbine during the night counts for base load. Otherwise we are talking 0.2-0.25 capacity factors.

Those nuclear accidents are covered in those numbers. The deaths from nuclear have simply not been very high, and the amount of energy created is massive. The result is a very low mortality per unit of power.

Based on this list, even the summed death toll of these incidences is still massively lower than the single worst incident involving hydroelectricity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

If every single nuclear plant exploded like Fukushima a productive lifetime like Fukushima had did that would still be only an order of magnitude more deaths from nuclear than from coal.

Nuclear killed a lot of people already and will for the next thousands of generations. There is still no proper prospect of how to get rid of that poison. That's not comparable to any other technology. That's why nuclear energy needs to demolished and banned.

Coal produces about 2/3rds as much nuclear waste per unit power. [1](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/5077), [2](https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html).

We do little to even try to contain that waste, and aren't even thinking of how to 'get rid of it'. The effects of this radioactive waste are totally overshadowed by the 'conventional' pollution caused by coal.

Nuclear power compares pretty well to this.

We could take all the current nuclear waste, grind it up, and pump it into the atmosphere and there is still no reason to believe that it would lead to more than a blip in terms of mortality compared to coal.

In addition to the reductions in air quality that kills vast number of people from coal - multiple Chernobyls every year - coal plants also pump vast quantities of radioactive material like uranium particles into the air.

While nuclear waste would pump nastier stuff into the air, we know the consequences from Chernobyl: Most of it gets washed out and end up on the ground quickly. What doesn't tend to be less dangerous particulates like cesium isotopes.

I'm obviously not suggesting that we should, but that pretty much the worst possible scenarios you can think of would still end up killing fewer people than coal.

Right now I feel that nuclear waste would be easier to handle than run-away greenhouse effect. Of course renewable is by far the best energy option in conjuction with using less.

But all things considered I have given up hope that that will actually work in time - thus, by all means, we should build as-safe-as-possible nuclear power plants for the transition and shut down all fossil-based versions immediately.

Sounds like a terribly biased argument. Why would it kill for _thousands_ of generations?

It wouldn't. The OP has fallen victim to the "long half-life = bad" fallacy.

A long half-life means that the material is less radioactive. By definition.

Right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:

"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

The worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown. The amounts generated are small and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.

As a comparison, how does coal waste compare to that?

"Coal ash – the waste material left after coal is burned – contains arsenic, mercury, lead, and over a dozen other heavy metals, many of them toxic."

http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/code-black/coal-as...

"The study found that levels of radioactivity in the ash were up to five times higher than in normal soil," https://phys.org/news/2015-09-radioactive-contaminants-coal-...

How much coal waste is produced per year? Is it small enough to deal with easily?

"According to the American Coal Ash Association's Coal Combustion Product Production & Use Survey Report, nearly 130 million tons of coal ash was generated in 2014."

https://www.epa.gov/coalash/coal-ash-basics#03

Has any of the general public been killed though coal waste disasters? Lots of times:

http://www.catawbariverkeeper.org/issues/coal-ash-1/coal-ash...

NASA has estimated that using nuclear power has saved an estimated 1.8 million lives that would have been lost if the power has been replaced by fossil fuels: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...

(And yes, I know the people who oppose nuclear power usually will say they don't like coal and natural gas either, but we are going to need a predictable, reliable form of base load power for a long time. One of these three ways of generating electricity has much fewer health consequences than the other.)

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