Japan's nuclear technology faces extinction | Hacker News Reader

Japan's nuclear technology faces extinction

asia.nikkei.com

43 pointsRed_Tarsius66 comments

Although not the best comparison, oil industry has had some bad spills and other negative incidents. But oil is treated as too crucial of a resource to put too much restriction while nuclear power doesn't get much love.

This is part of the problem of having to rely on hype of general public with short attention span. I am all for higher safety standards on nuclear power. But when population loses interest, even critical technology will lack funding and research.

I wouldn't mind seeing some molten salt reactors[0] though.

On the other hand, China seems to think nuclear power is unavoidable.

"While the construction of new nuclear power plants has mostly stalled in industrial nations, China is pushing ahead to expand its nuclear power generation capacity.

China accounted for six of the eight new reactors where construction began in 2016 and the first three months of 2017."

---------------------------------

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

> This is part of the problem of having to rely on hype of general public with short attention span

The nuke industry could hire some of the big tobacco lobbists to educate (as oppssed to misleading) the public. Compared to oil and coal, nuclear power is orders of magnitude cleaner. Closing nuclear power stations means burning coal most of the time, because the coal power stations are already there. The only renewable resources capable of providing base load that can replace some of the nuclear power are geothermal, but to use that you need a suitable site and solar thermal with molten salt storage. Aging coal power stations could be probably converted to biomass as well. But none of these are going to fully replace nuclear power.

Solar, wind & batteries will power the future. It is a question of when not if. All others will fade into oblivion. So long, and thanks for all the Joules.

The fact that they've made so many gains despite governments often building barriers to help non-renewables is quite telling.

Nonsense. They won't scale.

They will. I'm an investor, i like to make money, and i hate losing it. So i'm happy there's still someone else on the other side of the trade :-)

The person on the other side of the trade also likes to make money and hates losing it.

So may the best one of us win. My most profitable investments have been based on other people's myopia, and it is a far sweeter victory than scoring points in an online discussion forum.

Nuclear power presently produces ~11% of world electricity. Wind + solar can scale to that penetration level even without battery storage and in much of the world wind or solar will already deliver LCOE lower than new-build nuclear. Reaching really high penetration levels depends on presently-unknown economics of large scale storage. (Much how the success or failure of molten salt reactors and every other next-generation nuclear dream is dependent far more on delivered costs than physics.)

EDIT: I see that you were responding to someone who is already sure that storage-backed wind and solar will become the only electricity sources. That's certainly a bolder claim than scaling up to match present-day nuclear penetration levels.

Certainly Wind and Solar can scale to 11%. The question is about the other 89%. A significant chunk of it could be nuclear instead of coal and we would definitely be better off. And make no mistake, you need to choose between coal and nuclear because it'll be a long while before batteries have sufficient capacity to power the grid for days at a time.

> Certainly Wind and Solar can scale to 11%. The question is about the other 89%.

Is it still in question? If you can get to 11% then you can get to 100% with enough geographic distribution and batteries. Wind and solar are now cheaper than coal, even old unsafe nuclear never got to that point.

This comment adds nothing and presents no argument. And I find this sentiment really hard to understand. Why bet everything on solar? Nuclear technology already exists now. In fact it's existed for quite awhile. We could have gotten rid of coal decades ago, if not for irrational fear. It may already be too late to stop climate change. Why wait another decade or two (or three...) until the kinks in solar are worked out (if they ever are...)?

It's also a bit ridiculous to point out the improvement in solar technology, and ignore everything else. Sure solar technology is improving over time. So is nuclear. And it could probably be improving a lot faster if it got the same level of interest. The major accidents everyone thinks of were all by decades old reactors. We know of much safer ways to do things, and we've learned a lot from those events.

Even coal will improve over time. All that discussion of the coming robot revolution surely applies to coal mining.

> It's also a bit ridiculous to point out the improvement in solar technology, and ignore everything else. Sure solar technology is improving over time. So is nuclear.

The solar improvements are a lot more demonstrable, the nuclear ones are usually more theoretical due to the time and cost of building new reactors.

>In fact it's existed for quite awhile. We could have gotten rid of coal decades ago, if not for irrational fear.

Unsafe nuclear has existed for quite a while. Safe nuclear has yet to prove it's practical, which includes being cost effective against wind and solar.

> And I find this sentiment really hard to understand. Why bet everything on solar?

Parent mentioned wind and solar, and they didn't exclude others like hydro and tidal where appropriate. That's not betting everything on solar.

>All that discussion of the coming robot revolution surely applies to coal mining.

To a large extent it already has. New mines are human intensive to create, but largely automated after they're online.

Ok, let's find some common ground: we agree current nuclear reactors "could be a lot better". With very finite uranium, coal, and oil deposits on earth these forms of energy generation are only a short-term solution. As an aside, it would also be great to save those energy supplies for a dark and rainy day.

My prediction is based on Econ 101: the cheapest solution will win.

Nuclear reactors (and coal plants) are long-term investment projects with payback over decades. If you're close to the equator, it doesn't even make sense today. And the increasing cost differential between solar and nuclear/coal will mean that zone is expanding towards the poles.

I'm sorry if you're financially or intellectually invested in nuclear, but that's what i think will happen.

Even if you look U-235 alone, we have at least a couple centuries of it using conventional reactor tech, based on the known (explored) deposits, and very conservative estimates of how many more we will discover once existing stock starts to dwindle and prices start going up. Less conservative estimates give it closer to 5-6 centuries.

Now, if we use the tech to its fullest extent - meaning U-238 breeder reactors, rather than conventional U-235 ones - then fuel supply is infinite for all practical purposes. It also by and large solves the nuclear waste problem.

The main problem with nuclear isn't price per watt, it's the upfront cost. It requires a massive initial investment before you start getting anything useful out of it, and it requires an even more massive investment to start deriving benefits from scaling up. Solar, on the other hand, can start with a very small investment, and gradually ramp up, with a smooth curve of decreasing cost as scale increases. That makes it more attractive to private sector.

Nuclear is something that pretty much requires very long term planning and subsidies of the kind that only governments are really capable of, and in the era of democratic governments and nuclear scare among the general public, it's just not happening.

Well, except for countries that don't have to care about public opinion. China, for example, is building a lot of new nuclear plants. They aren't ignoring solar, either, and they're making massive investments there as well - but they're not putting all their eggs in one basket.

I'm happy to hear uranium will last for a long time, gives us a good alternative if the sun ever stopped shining (e.g. massive volcano or asteroid). But it doesn't really change the economics.

China's newly installed solar capacity in 2016 was 34 GW and growing fast, they currently have 20 nuclear reactors under construction with a capacity of 20GW. So solar is quickly outpacing nuclear even in China, and the trend is in solar's favor.

The only saving grace that nuclear has at the moment is the lack of massive battery capacity. Electric cars are quickly changing that, and then it will be game over for nuclear.

I think that potential investors of nuclear reactors see this trend now as well, which is why interest in building new nuclear reactors in market-based economies is quickly fading (of course it depends on latitude at which point in time solar/wind dominance is reached). Quite substantial cost overruns are also typical for nuclear power plants, but rare for solar/wind.

Fusion has and always will be the power of the future. Joking aside, people often seem to ignore what we could do with a true energy breakthrough.

This is wishful thinking. Solar, wind and batteries has tons of unsolved problems. And I have serious doubts they will be solved in the next 15-20 years.

I hear news about new "revolutionary" batteries every months for at least 20 years. But still, every device uses the same old batteries.

Name some of those problems please?

Meanwhile LCOE of wind/solar is challenging that of coal power and closing to nuclear. In 15-20 years it would be way lower.

Batteries suck? They are quite expensive, have low capacity and age too quickly. They are also difficult to recycle.

>Name some of those problems please?

A windless week in the winter will leave you without power.

The biggest problem is that no system can withstand such huge alternations in amounts of generated power. Solar and wind energy isn't available 24/7 and generation can't be rapidly changed to compensate for changes in consumption.

Of course it is cleaner. Until you need to deal with nuclear waste. And until the accident. Afterwards, it is not. How many Fukushimas and Chernobyls are we supposed to experience? Do we first need to have a plant like Tricastin blow up, wiping out Rhône valley wines and all of Provence for thousands of years? No thanks.

"Chernobyl was just soviet mismanagement, the west is safe", "fukishima was an unexpected tsunami, everyone else is safe", "newer reactor designs are safe". The nuclear industry move the goal posts after every disaster.

Fukushima was not an unavoidable "act of God" as you seem to imply. Fukushima was a galloping series of well-documented fuckups and ignored warnings going back to its construction in 1967. There are no moving goalposts. And coal plants put more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear, even accounting for the historical odds of catastrophic failure. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

> Fukushima was a galloping series of well-documented fuckups and ignored warnings going back to its construction in 1967.

Exactly. Let me know when you fix humans, companies and governments, then I'll trust nuclear.

Have fun with global warming then. I think that humanity needs to come to terms with renewables and nuclear power (with fusion being the best case scenario) for the future of everyone on this planet.

Fortunately renewables are now becoming cheaper than either coal or nuclear. If we had our act together we could have reached the current point a decade ago.

If we had our act together, we could have worked out the problems with nuclear power fifty years ago. We don't, and I don't see why you think we suddenly will get it together for "renewables."

Because renewables are getting it together with a fraction of the government involvement and subsidies that nuclear takes. In my country they're succeeding despite the government trying to stack the playing field against them.

So what percentage of "renewables" does hydroelectricity account for? And why does Wikipedia's discussion of energy subsidies counter your claim, with hydroelectric alone receiving more than nuclear? By the way, renewables is in quotes as you could consider some forms of nuclear power renewable, yet you clearly don't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies#United_States

Unfortunately renewables provide little in terms of base load alternatives that could replace coal and nuclear.

That's where storage can improve things. Also, wind is near enough to baseload if it's spread over a large geographical area. It works down to wind speeds of 5-10 Km/h, which is constant enough that humans don't even feel it at those speeds.

Wind power is nowhere near baseload, it's around 0.45 average capacity factor. Baseload means a capacity factor of >= 0.9. That and the fact thay you need 1400 windmills of 1 MW each (eg. Nordic N1000) to replace a single 700 MWe nuclear reactor (eg. CANDU6).

No one I know is opposed to renewable energy, but advocates really do everybody a disservice when they try to argue that an intermittent power source is a replacement for base load power. As Bill Gates said in an interview "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."

So you're okay with the working-as-intended continuous rolling catastrophe that is coal, but the rare and preventable fuckups of nuclear are too much?

This seems like the same risk-evaluation glitch that makes people drive long-distance instead of flying, because terrorism, even though driving is orders of magnitude more deadly even with terrorism factored in.

This is a false dichotomy, we have more options on the table than coal or nuclear.

Not at 10 cents a kWh, and if we want the lights to turn on when we want.

Developing countries currently in the process of bringing a basic[1] modern standard of living to their people. They do not have the luxury of choosing any power source other than the absolute cheapest, which is currently and will continue to be coal for a long time. Many other options become available if you fix the local economy, reduce exploitation from foreign businesses, and grow local governments into a modern democracy that is interested in long-term problems. So

> [... l]et me know when you fix humans, companies and governments[.]

[1] e.g. washing machines that allow ~half of their population (usually women) to have the free time to get an education and contribute to the economy instead of spending all day hand-washing clothes/etc.

Furthermore, neither of those accidents were anything like the worst case scenarios possible. They required heroics individual beyond what was imagined necessary in their designs to keep the disasters so small.

I think the issue is further complicated by the under siege mentality that many nuclear energy proponents feel. If they think that opponents don't appreciate the benefits and exaggerate the risks, then they will tend to publicly downplay risks, and possibly believe their own rhetoric rather than looking for vulnerabilities to the system and engineering in additional safety measures.

Finally, how many designs that we call relatively dangerous now, were called dangerous while being constructed and put on line?

Were they not the worst case scenarios?

My understanding is that Chernobyl and the Fukushima reactor were both built by cutting huge corners, and that these flaws ended up leading to the disasters.

On the other side of the spectrum, things like planes get built and work because we know that planes falling out of the sky is super bad! Would it not be possible to ,for lack of a better word, be more careful?

That would require money. Energy companies are in the business of making money. Nuclear plants cost HUGE money to build, they deliver terrible value for money henceforth, and after a couple of decades they have to be shut down (in theory), so what's a company gotta do to make money? Cut corners.

The regulators also move the goal posts after evey disaster, even if it isn't not nuclear related. New reactor containments have to be designed to withstand airplane impact due to 9/11. Existing reactors also have to comply with this rule since 2008.

http://www.troutmansandersenergyreport.com/2009/02/nrc-requi...

We put the nuclear "waste" in breeder reactors. Problem solved. What's left decays fairly quickly and needs a couple of warehouses every fifty years.

No form of energy generation causes zero deaths. Chernobyl was a reckless expirement that went wrong. Fukushima is in no way comparable to Chernobyl regarding the amount of radiation released. We could increase security by stopping to demonize nuclear power and make it possible to build modern plants instead of running decades old designs with known flaws.

This is my own objection to nuclear energy. It's arguably very safe. It could be made clean, even the by-products.

But a mistake doesn't cost one generation, it costs many. The odds for an incident are supposed to be ridiculously low, yet I've seen two catastrophic meltdowns just in my lifetime. I don't feel any energy need is worth even risking the rightful inheritance of so many descendants, ...

Does it really? Do you have any evidence of it costing more than one generation anything? Not even Chernobyl disaster did that.

If you were born and raised in Chernobyl city or Pripyat, your prospects for having a normal life in those places would be dashed almost beyond comprehension. Maybe these places are not especially significant to you or me, but is this not "evidence" enough?

(Addendum: And, yes, a good amount of money is still being spent to keep this disaster contained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_New_Safe_Confinement)

For 170,000 dead who had the misfortune of living downstream of Banqiao Dam, their prospects got dashed as well. That's, what, 3.5x of Pripyat population?

Yet I don't see a scramble to shut down all hydro plants.

170k dead, and millions displaced. And, honestly, I think the outcry would be furious if such a dam disaster occurred today in the USA, rather than China in 1975.

Without sounding like I'm belittling the scale of that disaster, I still think of flood recovery as being relatively "short term" (a decade or two) compared to the aftermath of a nuclear meltdown (decades, possibly hundreds of years). That Chernobyl wasn't(/isn't) a bigger problem is partly due to reasonably effective intervention by an international team. The potential here is frightening enough that I don't think we should need high body counts to weigh the consequences.

> That Chernobyl wasn't(/isn't) a bigger problem is partly due to reasonably effective intervention by an international team.

Chernobyl wasn't a bigger problem because of the personal sacrifice of the thousands of liquidators that cleaned it up. I strongly recommend watching "Chernobyl 3828"[1], a short (~30min) documentary about that cleanup, by people that were involved in it.

> The potential here is frightening

Which is why the danger - even at Chernobyl - is usually severely overstated. I'm not saying the situation at Chernobyl wasn't a huge problem (see [1]). It just wasn't the insane danger that many believe it to be. For example, many of the liquidators involved in the cleanup are still alive, fighting Russian bureaucracy for the healthcare coverage they were promised in the Soviet era. Cancer is a long term consequence of working as a "bio robot", but modern medicine is making that increasingly survivable.

Fear tends to suppress rationality, so remember to stick to the facts, and remember that reputable sources can be hard to find for any topic.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV45AFCwcUc

> Chernobyl wasn't a bigger problem because of the personal sacrifice of the thousands of liquidators that cleaned it up.

While slightly clumsy wording on my side, I was trying to say exactly this while trying to encompass the able help of outside experts and agencies that all worked (and still work) to contain this disaster.

>Which is why the danger - even at Chernobyl - is usually severely overstated.

Perhaps by others, but not by me. I was simply saying that the disaster area is still and will likely long remain an unlivable place. I find that an unacceptable risk. You are welcome to disagree.

>Fear tends to suppress rationality, so remember to stick to the facts, and remember that reputable sources can be hard to find for any topic.

This goes both ways. Arguing from the standpoint of reactor designs we're not using and setting arbitrary thresholds for "huge" versus "insane" to decide what's really worthy of our concern and using "modern medicine" as a catchall for improved chances for survival as if it were a solved problem aren't good talking points. The variation in survivorship among the liquidators has as much to do with how much exposure they had working on site. Most of those with larger exposures aren't fighting for healthcare--they're already dead.

Besides, this all stemmed from my original reply about whether there was any evidence for the disaster costing more than one generation. I'll "stick to the facts" by saying it did, it does, and even the very battle against Russian beaucracy for healthcare coverage you mentioned shows that even the care of survivors remain an issue for later generations.

> I've seen two catastrophic meltdowns just in my lifetime.

In that same time:

-- Chinese businesses improperly dumped into a of silicon tetrachloride (and other nasty pollutants) waste from photovoltaic production.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-...

-- Multiple fly ash spills spread heavy metals (arsenic, chromium, mercury, etc) over large areas of land and into major rivers.

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

-- An incredible amount of CO2 was released, leading to accelerating risk of catastrophic climate problems.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14085030

That's just a handful of problems I can find links for in a few minutes. The impact even from nuclear isn't anywhere close to the same scale of damage that other types of power already did to the environment.

> But a mistake doesn't cost one generation, it costs many.

Even if this was a concern - it's not - we're still talking about a temporary problem, that gets much smaller each half-life. The metals from fly ash are a permanent problem.

Your sense of "temporary" is clearly much longer than mine.

No matter, I'm not sure why we're comparing Chernobyl against these and other environmental disasters when they should be lumped together--these are all sins of our species.

> Your sense of "temporary" is clearly much longer than mine.

The point is not how long "temporary" is. It's incredibly hypocritical to complain that nuclear power has some sort of serious "nuclear waste problem" that must have some type of 10,000 year solution while conveniently ignoring the actual problems in other power sources.

There should even be much nuclear waste in modern breeder reactor designs, but even with the older style reactors that currently exist, the waste still tiny thanks to uranium having millions of times higher energy density[1]. That waste gets less dangerous as it decays, so the "temporary" isn't a consistent danger - it's bad initially, but the long tail is significantly safer.

> why we're comparing

deaths / kWh [2]

Far too many people panic about the "dangers" of nuclear power, while conveniently ignoring the larger dangers from other power sources. Even including Chernobyl, nuclear power is still safer than any[3] other source of energy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densitie...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities

[3] Solar and wind are also very low, although dam failures and the dangers of working on rooftops to install solar cells make them slightly more dangerous than nuclear. We should obviously use these sources as well when possible. I'm sure we can also improve the safety of solar, such as installing during regular building construction instead of retrofitting existing roofs.

> The point is not how long "temporary" is. It's incredibly hypocritical to complain that nuclear power has some sort of serious "nuclear waste problem" that must have some type of 10,000 year solution while conveniently ignoring the actual problems in other power sources.

Yes, it would be hypocritical if that's what I was doing. Except, instead, I was simply submitting what I felt was an important concern with nuclear energy. Similarly, it's disingenuous to talk of breeder reactor designs and their "tiny" amounts of waste when these remain mostly experimental and undeployed. The original links you posted for some other environmental disasters are very real, otoh.

> This is part of the problem of having to rely on hype of general public with short attention span. I am all for higher safety standards on nuclear power. But when population loses interest, even critical technology will lack funding and research.

The bigger part of the problem is nuclear power is a case of "cheap, clean, safe, existing, pick any two".

And pretty much any form of renewable energy has the same problem.

Solar may fail somewhat on the clean, but wind doesn't. And both are cheaper than safe nuclear will ever be.

Both might be cheaper if you don't count storage.

> On the other hand, China seems to think nuclear power is unavoidable. > "While the construction of new nuclear power plants has mostly stalled in industrial nations, China is pushing ahead to expand its nuclear power generation capacity.

Given the scale of China's energy projects this isn't a whole lot. While China has more or less a "let's try it all" approach to energy, nuclear doesn't play any major role.

On the other hand, China seems to think nuclear power is unavoidable.

India too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%27s_three-stage_nuclear_...

Stage 2 is fast breeder reactors and stage 3 is thorium-fuelled reactors. Nuclear is their only realistic option if they want to at least slow the pace at which they're adding more coal-fired generating capacity.

I think there's a problem with how electricity generation issues get reported in the press. When we're talking about electrical power, there are three figures that sometimes get used (incorrectly) interchangeably: installed generation capacity (i.e. nameplate), actual electricity generated, actual electricity generated and consumed.

I'm not going to even bother with the third type, which is the most problematic for solar and wind (as you cannot control when and how much % of capacity you generate), because data is not readily available.

But even for the first vs. second type (installed capacity vs. actual generation), you have as percentages of total installed capacity / total actual generation:

2014-15:

- Renewable 'nameplate' installed capacity == 13.17%

- Renewable actual % total electricity generated == 2.97%

- Nuclear 'nameplate' installed capacity == 2.13%

- Nuclear actual % total electricity generated == 3.27%

2015-16:

- Renewable 'nameplate' installed capacity == 14.18%

- Renewable actual % total electricity generated == 3.09%

- Nuclear 'nameplate' installed capacity == 1.91%

- Nuclear actual % total electricity generated == 3.20%

In other words, renewable installed capacity went from 6.2 times that of nuclear in 14-15 to 7.4 times in 15-16. Yet, over the same period, renewable increased its share of actual electricity generated by a paltry 0.12% (as in, a twelfth of one percent). Nuclear installed capacity was unchanged and contributed 0.06% less to total actual electricity generated (i.e. generated relatively less as other sources added capacity in that year).

I sure hope the relationship between renewable installed capacity and generation are not linear, otherwise we're going to be working on this for a while...

SOURCE (horribly confusing tables and all): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_India

Uranium/Plutonium reactors are a dead technology. Toshiba lost vast sums of money when Westinghouse Electric went bankrupt recently, mostly for not being able to compete with more economical sources of energy.

That is not to rule out better (safer, simpler) forms of nuclear power, such as Thorium reactors, which is what India is promoting.

Imho, anyone starting a major new nuclear power project today, with the existing Uranium technology, has not done their sums right.

Natural Uranium is also okay if used in a reactor with a good track record like the CANDU. The problem is enriched uranium because:

- you are basically burning a metal as scarce as platinum (U235)

- nuclear proliferation risks

India doesn't have much Uranium, has mostly lost access to it because they developed nukes and has abundant Thorium resources. Their Thorium reactor design is based on the Candu PHWR which can run on natural uranium.

I wish the Indians the best of luck with their Thorium design, because then they could re-license it to other countries like Japan who's nuclear sectors went bust or are about to.

Commercial reactors are enriched to about 3% plus or minus a bit. Military (naval) reactors are very highly enriched to minimize the size needed. The cost and availability of the uranium has never been the problem. The Carter administration stopped the recovery of the unused uranium in spent fuel thus making the waste problem much worse for the industry. We have decades worth of perfectly good uranium sitting in spent fuel pools all over the country but are unable, by law, to recover it.

New Japanese reactor projects face formidable headwinds:

- Increasing efficiency and shrinking population (long term shrinking electricity demand)

- Intense public resistance in the wake of Fukushima

- Should public resistance wane, there are dozens of functional but presently idled reactors that could restart faster than you can build and pay off a new reactor

It would be quite ironic if irreversible climate change will come about because of ignorance of "green" anti-nuclear activists.

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