Hacker News Reader

> People are scared of nuclear energy for the same reason that they're scared of taking an airplane. Even though it's technically and statistically very safe, the perceived risk appears much greater. [...] I'm more worried about global warming than Fukushima and I'd gladly trade even a dozen of Fukushima-type incidents in the next decades (highly unlikely) if it could stop global warming and its dire, hard-to-revert consequences.

I could not agree more, but unfortunately global warming suffers from the exact opposite effect. The perceived risk appears very low to most people, because it is not very spectacular on human time scales. Even though it is by far the greatest existential risk we face.

I'm no biologist or scientist of any sort, but it seems this is a problem with all apex predators to some degree. You get to the top of the food chain by adapting to and being highly reactive to short term and catastrophic risk. Once you get there you have to do a 180 and suddenly be highly attuned to subtle and long term issues to stay there. It's simply a different skill set and frame of mind.

The way humans tend to overvalue short term gain and underplay long term consequences is well covered. This line of thinking bleeds heavily into politics and how our societies organize. Would like to know if it is actually an apex predator thing, it might just be part of being a mortal animal.

Is there anything in all of biology that IS attuned to subtle and long-term issues? I think I would argue that we are the closest to that.

You are right, there is pretty much nothing in biology that is. Humans are no exception, but until recently it was not a big problem because we did not have the power to significantly damage the climate and the biosphere (though the megafauna would probably disagree).

Fossil fuel powered technology has changed that, but we are psychologically and socially ill-equipped to deal with its transformative power.

Yes, of course. Long-term issues aren't any different than others; they only need longer (more generations) to manifest.

One class (meta-)examples are all mechanism actually promoting mutation, or other methods of genetic variation: Horizontal gene transfer is interesting in this regard. It's the ability to incorporate snippets of DNA the organism comes across.

These mechanisms are an adaptation to the "known unknowns": what if a new pathogen appears, or the environment (temperature, radiation, salinity etc) suddenly changes? To achieve some flexibility, these mechanisms make trade-offs, usually sacrificing short-term reproductive success.

It's probably not very informative to think of humans as apex predators. Yuval Harari in "Sapien" puts forth the interesting point that we were catapulted suddenly from cautious foragers to extreme lethality by our harnessing of fire and other technologies. We likely never had the chance to grow into the role of most dangerous animal. Thinking along those lines, our cautious forager ancestors probably did a lot of responding to short-term and catastrophic risk.

My dog may well have better apex predator instincts than I.

New reactor designs completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown. LFRs include an electrically cooled salt plug that seals a holding tank. If power fails, the molten salt melts the plug, and the fuel safely drains into the tank. I particularly like ThorCon's concept, where the reactor is underground. Another plus of this reactor type is that water cooling isn't needed, so siting is much more flexible.

Note that the ThorCon design can use uranium or thorium as fuel. ThorCon estimates it could be shipping reactors in ten years, and could produce 100 GW worth of reactors per year, at around three cents per KWH.

http://thorconpower.com/

I suggest watching the video on this page, it gives a good perspective:

http://thorconpower.com/news

"Completely eliminates the possibility" sounds like something a supervillain would say.

I'm not saying that this passive safety system won't work, or is a bad idea. It sounds great from the brief description. BUT. There's a terrible, terrible tendency of the pro-nuclear side to use bombastic language, and then sneer at those with doubts as ignorant and emotional rather than logical.

Pricing promises are another problem. "Power too cheap to meter" has been promised since the 1950s. It hasn't happened yet.

Be careful with your language.

>and then sneer at those with doubts as ignorant and emotional rather than logical

That's because you reply with things like this.

>sounds like something a supervillain would say.

When you tell me something "completely eliminates" the possibility of failure in complex industrial design - you're being emotional rather than logical.

Look, I'm actually pro-nuclear. But I think the arguments made for nuclear power are mostly awful, driven by techno-fetishism and wishful thinking rather than real logic. The "But I'm logical and you're just emotional!" argument is itself an emotional argument, a rush to claim a moral high ground (you'll see the exact same style and phrasing used in any political argument where privileged white guys are dismissing the points of women and minorities).

As others wisely pointed out in this thread, nuclear power suffers from a problem of feeling dangerous even when it's safe - and likewise, global warming feels safe even when it's an existential threat to civilization. If you want to make progress rather than score points, you need to take the emotional nature of the argument into account.

I didn't say your argument sounds like something a supervillain would say because I think the technology is bad. I said it because I think the phrasing is bad. Wise up.

> When you tell me something "completely eliminates" the possibility of failure in complex industrial design - you're being emotional rather than logical.

No.

Modern reactor designs are actually designed in a way that makes it difficult to maintain the reaction. If you are not actively maintaining it, then it will stop on its own. This is opposed to the most common existing designs, where you need to expend effort to _stop_ the reaction.

This is not to say that they cannot fail in some novel ways.

> This is not to say that they cannot fail in some novel ways.

So, then, they do not "completely eliminate" the possibility of failure. Your last sentence seems to contradict the "No." at the beginning of your reply.

They consider all the possibilities possible.

> So, then, they do not "completely eliminate" the possibility of failure. Your last sentence seems to contradict the "No." at the beginning of your reply.

I didn't say anything about "completely eliminating the possibility of failure". I said "completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown" which is in fact correct.

ThorCon plans on operating the plants about 100 feet underground, which will even mitigate a deliberate attack with an airliner. There is no way to make anything absolutely, 100% safe, but this approach is mighty close.

That is in contrast with fossil fuel pollution, which kills hundreds of thousands of people a year.

To be fair, Recurecur said:

> New reactor designs completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown.

not necessarily of any failure, to which they were willing to accept that things can fail in novel ways, just not meltdowns in their view.

>I didn't say your argument sounds like something a supervillain would say because I think the technology is bad. I said it because I think the phrasing is bad. Wise up.

Not my argument, but the point is that comparing something to "what a supervillain" would say is an emotional, not logical, response. What supervillain introduces technologies that are immune to whole classes of failures?

>When you tell me something "completely eliminates" the possibility of failure in complex industrial design - you're being emotional rather than logical.

If someone proposes switching from coal powered plants to natural gas powered plants with the argument that it completely eliminates the possibility of coal dust as a byproduct, would you deride them as well?

The senior engineer at my company was from Duke Energy. At the beginning of the Fukushima incident he loudly proclaimed that the safety mechanisms would kick in, preventing a disaster. He held educational session during lunch so he could explain the engineering. We all know the rest of the story.

That just means he was an idiot. The problems of the design were well known. The potential failure points were well known and are part of the design. This is nothing new and has been understood for a long time.

A good initial design eliminates many of the complicated failure mechanism.

A molted salted liquid fueled Thorium reactor simply does not have these problems. Coming up with a scenario where it would fail at such a high level is hard to even imagine.

Do these designs also completely eliminate the possibility that human error or outright negligence could cause a catastrophic failure? Because those were almost always major factors in nuclear accidents.

They do, when implemented properly. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety#Example... for why some passive safety features fail.

Solar prices in the sunniest regions have already dipped below 3c unsubsidized, and are projected to keep falling for decades to come, even without any major technological breakthroughs. So aiming for that price 10 years out, with a new design isn't a very good sign

What are solar prices like in the night? /s

Renewable are all nice and good, but currently we're still building fossil fuel power plants all over the world. It would be better if we instead built nuclear plants. Expanding renewables and nuclear are not opposites of each other.

>What are solar prices like in the night? /s

Is that a rhetorical question? Because night time usage largely relies on battery storage for which economies of scale are also reducing the cost in a similar predictable fashion.

/s means sarcasm

However I will say there are newer solar panels that I've read about being tested which can theoretically produce power by moon light. Granted it won't be anywhere near the amount during the day but generating energy via solar at night time isn't entirely impossible it just won't be generating the same amount by orders of magnitude.

It really comes down to storage. Solar is just now passing coal costs. when it falls another order of magnitue, most of the effort will go to pumping water up hills or batteries or whatever.

Solar panels already can generate light from the moon, it's just 100000x less.

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

It would be cheaper to do any number of things(battery storage, Nuclear, world power grid) than to build out more solar capacity to capture the pitiful full moon light once a month.

Solar at night is currently 10c (again it seems to be falling in price as more roll out), at least in places that have strong enough sunlight for concentrating solar:

https://www.thenational.ae/business/dubai-set-for-world-s-ch...

I feel like when a company says 10 years away it generally means that the company is still looking for funding... and 5 years away generally means they finally got the funding and are now building and experimenting.

China also says 10 years away for the LFR, but I've heard murmors of 5-7 years from a few articles... meaning they likely are finally starting to get some investment.

Its hard to compete in the nuclear business when literally everything else, including useless stuff like ethanol get subsidies like crazy. Also, existing regulation made much of this research impossible.

With the subsidies and research fund wind and solar have gotten we could have LFR easy by now.

Its also hard to sell nuclear when most nation want buy it, either because they can't, want to produce their own, or are against it.

The fact is LFR offer unlimited energy supply at minimal fuel cost, it is green, stable, reliable, controllable and safe. We could have had it 50 years ago, but since then the deck has just been stacked against it and its hard to revive it.

So yes, the company is probably more then 10 years away, but if this was part of a national energy strategy, things would happen pretty fast.

a) New designs are good, but something that's "10 years away" is more an idea, than it is a product.

b) It's not so much that designs can't be safe, but the trick is realizing real systems based on the design, that actually are safe. Over time.

Never underestimate the power of human mis-management when it comes to corrupting perfectly sound pieces of engineering, especially when you need to plan for a 50, 100 or 250 year horizon.

Ecologists against nuclear baffles me too. You'd think they'd be booster #1. Worst-case, Chernobyl still worked out pretty darn well for the local ecosystem.

> Personally I'm of the opinion that going all nuclear would be a mistake but on the other hand it's a great way to move away from coal and petrol while we're still figuring out how to scale renewable energies (and maybe fusion, but that's still a moonshot). It provides cheap, reliable and reasonably safe energy with very little CO2 emissions.

The last time I really looked into it, it seemed like nuclear energy was a pretty way to combat global warming. It has numerous issues like cost, construction time, production bottlenecks, etc. Renewables seemed a lot better (particularly when you factor things in like the cost reduction as production ramps up), but it would be a mistake to simply think about energy production. From what I recall, things like improving energy efficiency were at least as important.

Some differences between the airplane analogy and the nuclear plant analogy:

1) When a plane fails catastrophically, the impact is limited to a smaller geographical area.

2) Pollution from the failure of a plane doesn't involve what is estimated to be a century-long endeavor to cleanup.

3) The toxicity from plane failures do not invade nearly every facet of life, making entire areas unlivable.

I am not a proponent of nuclear energy because we do not have a way to handle the full lifecycle, including failures. We will have this someday, but the idea of "well throw this waste into a rock formation somewhere and hope it doesn't cause a problem because it takes hundreds of years to handle" is just not reasonable. Even today, the Hanford site in Washington is leaking radioactive shit into the Columbia River and there is no estimated date to complete this cleanup.

I completely understand where you're coming from but you can't just take nuclear energy in a vacuum. Of course if the alternative was between nuclear power plants and the miracle energy drive which runs on dreams and produces terrawatts without any risks and any pollution then there's no question.

But that's not the world we live in. Today we have renewable energy, which is promising but not yet ready to be our sole source of energy. Then we have fossil energy which wrecks our climate at an alarming pace. Then we have nuclear which has its own set of problems but at least won't contribute to global warming.

Sure it's a tragedy that Pripyat and Fukushima are now unlivable and will remain so for a long, long time. But global warming will probably make entire continent-sized stretches of land effectively unlivable. That's what you should be pitting nuclear reactors against.