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Comment by legulere | Hacker News Reader

> (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study)

Wikipedia seems to give 4000 as an estimate on those exposed to the highest levels of radiation alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Cancer_proj...

On the other hand coal, wind and solar never poisoned our food (wild boars in Germany thousands of km away still often are too radioactive to be eaten ). Coal, wind and solar never led to emergency evacuations. Coal, wind and solar cannot be used to make atomic bombs.

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Coal burning has poisoned more food than literally any other industrial activity of humankind. Where do you think the mercury in fish comes from?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_in_fish#Origins_of_mer...

Really? Have you already forgotten about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...

If coal plants had the same radiation rules as nuclear plants, they couldn't run.

> If coal plants had the same radiation rules as nuclear plants, they couldn't run.

I think you mean if nuclear plants had the same radiation output as coal plants, they would be required to shut down.

Edit: thanks for the downvotes, I realise now that I'm basically stating the same thing as OP.

Quite the double standard that coal plants are allowed to spew so much radiation when all other forms of power generation are held to a higher standard.

What @wbl wrote also makes sense. Nuclear power has a closed fuel cycle: what goes in comes out and is stored.

There's no way we could hope to capture all the radioactive particles from a coal plant exhaust, not in the foreseeable future with any reasonable efficiency.

> Nuclear power has a closed fuel cycle: what goes in comes out and is stored.

Nowadays yes, but this wasn't always the case. The earliest Soviet reactors were open cycle and discharged directly into Lake Kyzyltash. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay

Lesson learned: Don't trust Stalin and Beria with a nuclear plant. Or anything else, of course, but fortunately for everyone both men are safely dead and their danger thus permanently curtailed.

Just being closed cycle isn't enough. A couple of the early British reactors apparently exposed the public to low levels of neutron and gamma radiation in normal operation because part of the cooling loop was outside the radiation shield for cost-saving reasons.

A lot of early reactors did a lot of things we now recognize as members of the "pants on head" category of activities. We know better now because back then they didn't, and had to discover what not to do the hard way. We are fortunate to have such examples, and would be foolish to squander such hardly learned knowledge.

This is incredibly myopic.

Burning coal for electricity generation has released in to the environment more radiation, heavy metals, and other pollutants than civil nuclear power could ever hope to.

Nuclear plants in normal use release less radionuclides into the environment than coal. But is this still the case with malfunction?

It is fairly common that huge amounts get released. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascó_Nuclear_Power_Plant

How about Fukushima and Chernobyl. Do you have numbers to back up your claim?

"Huge amount" which is not even considered a serious incident?

As a sibling comment pointed out, you may have selected a poor example there.

However, you raise a good point with the Fukushima and Chernobyl examples. It's not hard to imagine that if we had, globally, built nuclear power plants as enthusiastically as we have coal power plants, there would likely have been a lot more serious incidents. It's a sobering thought for my usually rose-tinted view of nuclear.

While I could probably have found a more dramatic reference, this one[1] is a bit more calm saying that the risks of adverse health affects from radiation exposure from coal vs nuclear are, in both cases, very slim. It would seem, then, that coal would have other negative health affects before the radiation exposure aspect became a problem. You have to live extraordinarily close to either a coal or nuclear plant to have higher than background radiation exposure from either, under normal operating conditions.

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Coal have unavoidable casualties in human health and environmental degradation built into normal operations. Nuclear much less so, so while I also wear those specs, I still believe the argument for Nuclear is sound.

Another thing I like to point out is how much of a wildlife haven Chernobyl is compared to any moderate city. The fear that keeps the humans away, has transformed a "safe" dump into a paradise.

talking about miopic

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pro...

fearmongering works wonder against an uneducated population.

Yep. What really astounds me is that, when I was younger I used to associated with a lot of self-proclaimed environmentalists, the sort of people who would go to anti-<whatever> protests. They were strongly against nuclear.

Ah the irony! It is the environmentalists themselves who are directly to blame for the situation we find ourselves in now. We could have relatively-carbon-free electricity today if they had supported nuclear power.

But, putting my tin-foil hat on for a minute, I am lead to believe that the anti-nuclear movement is actually perpetuated by the fossil-fuel industry. Or maybe my B12 dependant psychosis is playing up again.

Absolutely. We Greens (I am a loyal Australian Greens voter) scoff and roll our collective superior eyes at the stupid Libs and their proven boken models and then we demonise the one solution we have and have had for 60 years, and I wonder if we are so different from those we despise.

I used to vote for the Australian Greens, until I had the realisation I wrote about above.

Now I'm not sure what to do. At this point in time I believe drawing penises on the ballot paper provides the best value.

It's good that you don't mention hydroelectric energy, because based on your criteria this is the most dangerous way to produce electric power, killing 170,000 people in a single incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Except that Banqaio Dam was required anyway for flood control purposes, so the choice wasn't between killing 170,000 people and using some other form of power. All that not using hydroelectric power would've achieved is to ensure that nuclear proponents could no longer blame those deaths on hydroelectric power. Not only that, nuclear power didn't exist yet when it was built. Which is probably a good thing - Banqaiao Dam was build significantly under the specs recommended by its engineer for cost reasons, then operated unsafely; can you imagine what would happen if China built a nuclear power plant with the same approach?

Couldn't you use the same reasoning for Chernobyl? A requirement to build an electric power plant, sloppy construction, sloppy operation, resulting in a catastrophic accident.

Exactly. Chernobyl was an unsafe design, when safe(r) designs were well known. Its operation was not just sloppy, the operation that was performed was a crazy experiment that was well beyond the operating specs of the reactor, clearly illegal and unsafe even in the best of times.

"Coal,"

Don't mix coal... with wind and solar.

Coal releases proportional amounts of carbon dioxide when used to generate power. On the other hand, wind and solar release fixed amounts of carbon dioxide (during construction and transport) then generate energy C02 free.

..except for maintenance. Does anybody have up-to-date numbers how long hydro/solar/wind have to run to recoup the energy used in production? For a while, Solar was essentially "let's import energy from Asia in the form of pretty sand", but I think this has changed.

> For a while, Solar was essentially "let's import energy from Asia in the form of pretty sand", but I think this has changed.

Considering the fact that efficient pv panels need less than 4% of their lifetime output for production (if in service 25 years (most panels last up to 40 years)), that must have been the late 70s or so.

You were probably remembering that 2010 study talking about the rapidly growing solar industry as a whole becoming net producers of energy, e.g. current industry energy input is now lower than current running PV output (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/pv-net-energy-04021...). But that doesn't say much about net energy production per panel over the panel's lifetime, e.g. if the PV industry would disappear this very moment, existing PV installations would still produce energy for decades.

The numbers I heard had a 50% replacement/failure rate or so after 10 years. However, that might have been related to the roof installations in Germany.

"..except for maintenance."

Good point. Q. Would the amount of energy generated by a solar/wind system outstrip energy used to maintain?

Coal probably does poison our food with mercury and other heavy metals :(

Also if a terrorist flys a plane into a coal plant they will not make hundreds of km² uninhabitable.

At least some nuclear power plants where designed to withstand a plane crash. E.g. the one in Doel (Belgium) [1] (dutch link).

[1] http://fanc.fgov.be/GED/00000000/2900/2954.pdf

WTC Twin Towers were also "built to withstand a plane crash." But obviously not those planes that have hit them:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1340225/Twin-towers-built-to...

And the initial design was 30 floors less.

The Fukushima plant had a wall to protect it from tsunami and the motors to keep the pumps working when there the electricity fails. The whole design however didn't cover that particular wave:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1388629/Japan-tsunam...

The tsunamis like that happened there "only once in a thousand years" so nobody (who made the executive decisions) expected that one.

Still there were the stone markers in Japan, many hundreds of years old, with the marking "Do not build your homes below this point!"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html

"As time passes, people inevitably forget."

Neither will it do that flying int nuclear plant.

If a terrorist flies a plane into a nuclear plant, the only thing that will be uninhabitable will be the plane.

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