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Comment by ageofwant | Hacker News Reader

And why is all that? Red tape and bureaucracy, while the world literally burns. If the same rules applied to coal or even gas burning generators the cost would exceed that.

Nuclear power stations are extremely modular, there are at least twenty of them circling australian waters as I type. I'm going to go out on a limb and venture that you will find less coal and solar powered submarines than that.

These issues are not technical, they are political, and rooted in irrational bullshit propagated by stupid and irresponsible people.

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> And why is all that? Red tape and bureaucracy, while the world literally burns.

Can I ask what specific requirements surrounding the development and operation around nuclear plants constitutes red tape in your opinion? My understanding is that most of the regulations concerning operation are in place to ensure the possibility of a disaster is minimized to nil.

> These issues are not technical, they are political

As expressed in my above comment, I would argue that nuclear power's problems are neither technical nor political, but nearly totally economic in nature. It's on the losing side of current trends.

You can start by listing everything required from a nuclear blueprint, that is not required of a coal blueprint. A industry that kills hundreds of thousands of people a year operating within 'acceptable' constraints, as I said. "Minimising disaster to nill" is a absolute and ridiculous fallacy, require the same of coal and see what the costs tally to.

We are past the point where we can entertain fictions like "economics" and "trends" and treat them like they were carved from the gaze of Kek on the buttoks of the whore of Babylon, towering over the trembling spirit of powerless men. Seriously "trends" "economics" wtf does that even mean ?

A plane hitting a coal plant has a vastly different threat potential than a plane hitting a nuclear fission plant, just as one example where just because both structures are "power plants", it doesn't mean there aren't different safety requirements, even if you remove all the "red tape".

Does it? Who told you that, or is it simply something you believe because its "obvious".

Chernobyl's second reactor is happily churning away in the middle of a wildlife paradise. If that is what the world's worst nuclear disaster has come to then I think we can have a good hard look at why a nuclear plant costs tens of billions of dollars, the majority costs sunk into compliance. Compliance required and inspired by irrational fears.

How about you start to provide some sources that show that current security measures are indeed purely bureaucratic, irrational vestiges and not actually required. Also, your tone is not appreciated and unnecessary in a discussion like this

This [0] is an F-4 hitting a concrete wall and was used to inform the design of containment walls around reactors.

Would there be some shitty days for people and things outside the containment wall? You bet! But there wouldn't be any shitty nuclear days. In fact, I suspect radioactivity release would be worse with a coal plant crash as it would release the nasty stuff that we do manage to scrub out of the exhaust.

[0] https://youtu.be/RZjhxuhTmGk

> I'm going to go out on a limb and venture that you will find less coal and solar powered submarines than that.

To be fair, submarines are an entirely different use case compared to public energy grid generation. The former requires high power density with low weight. Coal and solar don't tend to deliver that underwater. Nuclear is indeed one of the top choices for a submarine. The economic point I'm making isn't applicable twenty thousand leagues under the sea.

But it is applicable for conventional energy grid generation, and it performs poorly compared to solar and battery storage, so much so that the world is currently building several large nuclear power plant's worth of capacity annually with solar alone.

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