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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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...

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.

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