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Comment by CptFribble | Hacker News Reader

When you consider the whole life cycle start to finish, nuclear power is the second safest in terms of deaths per terawatt-hour produced, only following hydroelectric power. That also includes every nuclear disaster ever.

Solar energy is great, we need more of it, and I think the long-term future of power includes a microwave transmission solar station at one of the Lagrange points.

However, when you look at the total externalities, nuclear is actually the safest and cleanest form of power that we could use in the medium term.

Except that everyone is afraid of it, and no one wants to spend the money.

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True - however if you consider the true lifecycle from start to end (including construction costs, and decomissioning) nuclear is one of the most expensive power sources.

The costs for proper decomissioning of a nuclear plant and safe storage of the used materials are excluded in most analysis, as the time and cost horizon is so large.

On Solar Panels: there are some very interesting projects by large environmental service providers underway that use high pressure water or very high temperatures, to separate the glass from metal frame.

I think a similar hurdle are carbon fibres, you can't burn or shred them (carcinogenic micro fibres).

There are some interesting projects that try to clean and reuse the fibres through some kind of chemical baths..but most of the old e.g. wind turbines are just stored at a giant wind turbine graveyard right know.

It's a fascinating field!

From what I understand most of the real costs in terms hazardous disposal for nuclear is that nuclear plants are designed to be dirty. They are designed to create weapons fuel, which means lots more of highly radioactive byproducts that are unavoidable if you want these refined fissionable materials.

From what I’ve seen of modern designs that can’t be used for weapons programs, there’s significantly lower costs associated with disposal and decommissioning plants.

Do you have any references you coul point is to?

Hinkley point in the UK got a strike price of 2x what renewables would cost.

Globally, hydro is three times as risky as rooftop solar, there were ~171,000 dead from the Banquio Dam failure alone - http://www.nuceng.ca/refer/risk/risk.htm

Also, I keep seeing figures for rooftop solar and not solar in general, and the risk for rooftop solar is due to the risk of working on a roof. If solar was mandated in new build and major roof repair, wherever it made sense to install it, this risk can be greatly reduced as the largest risk is during putting the scaffolding up and taking it down again.

In Australia. I've never seen anyone scaffold their roof to retrofit solar.

Meanwhile, four people died as a result of a nationwide campaign to install roof insulation and that became a massive political controversy.

I don't doubt people die installing solar, but it's interesting that we never seem to hear about it.

The waste is radioactive for many human lifetimes however. That's the piece that seems highly irresponsible to me: assigning radioactive waste management to many future generations. IIRC, there are some reactors with waste which lasts less than a human lifetime, or generate waste which can be utilized or broken down with an additional reactor. I could get behind those. The solar waste problem is fixed with a recycling upcharge on purchase and some additional cost reduction on the technology. This is a tame problem compared to radioactive waste which will likely outlast the civilization which produced it, never mind the individuals.

My impression from the article is that solar panels have similarly-severe byoroducts (maybe not specifically radioactive, but certainly not stuff I'd want seeping into my drinking water).

We're already fucking over future generations with a massive carbon footprint. Replacing all that with nuclear would be objectively less bad.

Yes, that is the impression the article is trying to give.

It's too bad the article has to lie in order to give that impression.

Nuclear waste disposal is an extremely overblown challenge. There are already digs in place in Finland and the US with capacities to store centuries worth of nuclear waste, a mile underground.

The concern that some future civilization will manage to dig so deep, in an area with no natural resources, crack open some of the waste caskets, and then die because they fail to figure out it is poisonous is one of the most ridiculously far fetched concerns. Contrast that extremely remote possibility with the certainty of pumping toxic greenhouse gases directly into our atmosphere. I cannot fathom why one would believe the former is preferable to the latter, but some countries like Germany seem to have made that conclusion.

> There are already digs in place in Finland and the US with capacities to store centuries worth of nuclear waste, a mile underground.

And this is why nuclear waste disposal is _not_ an overblown challenge. Because even though there are already digs in place, almost all of the waste still sits right by in-use reactors. The US has been trying to fix this since the 80s, and afaik real progress has not been made since the bill to put it in Yucca mountain was killed in 2010. It might be a political challenge rather than a technical challenge, but it is an _extremely_ difficult political challenge that should be deeply considered when supporting nuclear energy. It is not really safe or cheap for it to stay above ground by reactors forever.

Yes, that's a good point. It is a significant challenge, but the challenge is overwhelmingly political rather than technical.

You say afraid as if it is a bad thing.

When you consider the timescale of nuclear power plants and how long nuclear power has existed, safety stats seem to have a pretty low sample size with a lot of uncharted territory.

That fear you mention is a very real and important one, because even if 99% of plants operate under strict safety, it only takes one failure to cause massive damage. Beyond lives and into land and resources, and additional risks of further ecological harm.

For me, when considering if nuclear power is worth it, I think that we have so many alternatives that will work well enough for a long-term horizon (let's say 200 years) that any sort of risks of charting that new territory in nuclear power and having that very large risk is not worth it currently.

That's not to say it won't be worth it in the future perhaps as climate change worsens or in a century with additional safety tools possibly fueled by additional scientific insight, but right now I think you're severely undermining that some (not all) fear of nuclear power comes from a very rational place.

i agree to a lot of your points. nuclear power has had few incidents, but those there have been have had far stretching consequences and have caused massive casualties spanning multiple generations let alone the permanent increase in background radiation which is slowly eating away at everything.

for me it's the ultimate of the bad / destructive ways to create energy and should be avoided (opinion.)

i'd say with those stats in mind hydroelectric and wind power are some of the winners, even though of course the equipment manufacturing and decomissioning of these isn't totally clean, they are a big step in the right direction of non-destructive cleanER energy source.

"When you consider the timescale of nuclear power plants and how long nuclear power has existed, safety stats seem to have a pretty low sample size with a lot of uncharted territory."

That's true of literally all of our modern sources of electricity aside from maybe coal and oil.

What are you talking about? The timescale of nuclear power is comparable to most other forms of electricity generation. We have reliable, long term statistics which show it to be insanely safe compared to all other forms of generation, and that's despite the fact that all these reactors are shithouse designs from the stone ages. We know how to build reactors that are orders of magnitude more safe, which is remarkable since nuclear is already the safest form of electricity.

As for using risk as an excuse to avoid it—nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than air travel, but you don't see anyone deciding that we should continue to travel by boat.

> As for using risk as an excuse to avoid it—nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than air travel, but you don't see anyone deciding that we should continue to travel by boat.

if you look at failure rate, there are only 450 nuclear power plants currently in existence as of 2016. To save time, let's do some napkin math and estimation with charitable rounding. Let's say there are 1000 in existence. So far we have seen at least one critical failure. For the sake of rounding, let's charitably round that to 1 failure. Let's say that of those 1000 power plants, the average time of existence is 40 years. That means that we have about 40000 years of nuclear power plant testing so far. And we've had 1 failure in that, so if we use years, we have 1 in 40000 years.

Even adjusting to days, we get 1 in 14.6 million.

Looking at air travel, the crash rate is about 1 in 4 million.

Now consider the consequences of that one catastrophic failure compared to the cost of a plane crash on average. You can't be serious when you say those are the same.

Even with incredibly charitable looks at nuclear power safety stats it's nowhere near your uncited "orders of magnitude" safer.

I think you really don't get the risk formula here. It's not about failure percentage, it's about the consequences of any failure at all, no matter how rare. An increase in nuclear power only increases the chances of any failure.

https://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-powe... https://www.cnn.com/2015/01/22/travel/flight-crash-app/index...

Lies, damned lies, statistics.

One flight serves 100-400 people for a few hours. One nuclear reactor serves N million people for N decades.

Everyone in a plane crash dies. What percentage of electricity users die in a typical nuclear disaster? 0.001%?

"That also includes every nuclear disaster ever."

Assuming there won't be any disasters worse than what has already occurred.

Presumably any new nuclear capacity would use safer designs, but still, the tail end single event worst case scenario is a lot scarier.

The P/R angle of it is the problem. It's just politically easier to sell something to the public that has a gradual and constant risk and death rate rather than something that bunches them.

Nuclear disasters are almost exclusively the result of astonishing human incompetence which is almost unheard of in any comparable industry. Airlines have shown that it is possible to manage big risks.

(Before you say Fukushima, remember the carnage and death was caused by an insanely catastrophic tsunami. Despite massive incompetence and disastrous consequences, it has resulted in a grand total of 1 death so far, with perhaps a few dozen over the lifetime of all people in the area. Not nothing, but it shows just how safe this stuff is when you extricate paranoia from the equation.)

I was thinking more along the lines of, solar flare coinciding with massive earthquake causes multiple simultaneous Chernobyl's type thing.

In that scenario I’d be more worried about the earthquake. Orders of magnitude more deadly.

I dunno, stack exchange says it could be an all life on earth's surface type thing.

https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/65198/what...

Yes, if you start with this hilariously implausible premise and cherry-pick the conclusion that suits your narrative. In reality the major disruption to electricity markets would be far more consequential to >99% of humans on this planet.

Choice quotes:

"Short answer not much would happen. There just is not enough of them and even in the worst case breakdown they don't release that much radiation."

"Even if every single reactor in the US 'failed' today, I doubt there would be significant radiation leakage ... without a 40 foot tsunami, I think this is more like Three Mile Island."

"The problem is that there is a great deal of exaggeration in the public's idea of radiation - the "Omigawd, it's radioactive! We're all gonna DIE!" effect."

When you consider the whole life cycle of nuclear, you have to take into account the next few hundred thousand years as the waste loses its radioactivity. Who knows how many natural disasters, and therefore deaths, will happen based on nuclear waste that is currently stored in insecure, leaky above-ground containers. If you consider deaths per year of risk, there's no way that nuclear energy is as safe as solar.

Something that's usually missed about nuclear waste is that the most radioactive wastes have the shortest half lives so burn themselves out quickly. The waste that lasts for thousands of years is far less radioactive. For example, in a uranium mine, you don't even care about the dose you get from uranium (~4 billion year half life), but you do care about the fission products with far shorter half lives. Your point stands though.

But some of these have medium half-lives have decay sequence through many materials with very short half-life. So even a small amount of decay from the medium-life material can then release a lot of radiation; enough that the original material is extremely dangerous.

"Who knows how many natural disasters, and therefore deaths, will happen based on nuclear waste that is currently stored in insecure, leaky above-ground containers."

Maybe we could, you know, not store radioactive waste above-ground?

> Who knows how many natural disasters, and therefore deaths, will happen based on nuclear waste that is currently stored in insecure, leaky above-ground containers.

I do.

The number is zero.

Any disasters that occur due to that are artificial disasters, not natural ones, even if a natural disaster is also part of the chain of causality.

Nuclear power is dead for economic reasons.

Yes, I know, engineers are somewhat insulted by the public's refusal to accept their risk modelling. That's why this has become somewhat of a cultural fight. It sometimes feels like there's a segment of armchair scientists, forever stuck in the science-fiction of the 50s, and not noticing that the real world has long since moved on, to something far better than their vision of a nuclear-powered vacuum cleaner for every happy wife.

Even if you somehow manage to change the perception (which is unlikely, considering you probably wouldn't even accept "perception" as anything real worthy of consideration), it doesn't matter: Actual scientists have long moved on and, with a lot of help of forward-thinking politicians, invested into wind, battery, and solar technology, making it cost-competitive with even coal today.

>Nuclear power is dead for economic reasons.

I'd say that BNFL killed itself through dishonesty. They may have had a viable business otherwise.

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199798/cmselect/cmtr...

https://www.wired.com/2000/02/uk-nuclear-fuel-scandal-widens...

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/sellafield-crisis-...

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bnfl-to-be-wound-up-by-en...

Nuclear power is dead because nuclear weapons and because we don't teach most kids basic physics. (I was taught the basics of nuclear physics in high school, but that was an elective, not a required course.) As a species we are programmed to fear the unknown.

>As a species we are programmed to fear the unknown.

Looking about the place, this seems unlikely.

Correct, we have done a remarkable job of educating ourselves to defy our genetic programming.

Ok, now explain cats.

Artificial selection.

We are now miles off the topic, but curiosity got the better of me (or did it?) so I thought I would check the research...

>"The domestication of cats took a different trajectory. Wildcats are improbable candidates for domestication (see Table 3). Like all felids, wildcats are obligate carnivores, meaning they have a limited metabolic ability to digest anything except proteins (33). Cats live a solitary existence and defend exclusive territories (making them more attached to places than to people). Furthermore, cats do not perform directed tasks and their actual utility is debatable, even as mousers (34). [In this latter role, terrier dogs and the ferret (a domesticated polecat) are more suitable.] Accordingly, there is little reason to believe an early agricultural community would have actively sought out and selected the wildcat as a house pet. Rather, the best inference is that wildcats exploiting human environments were simply tolerated by people and, over time and space, they gradually diverged from their “wild” relatives (35, 36). Thus, whereas adaptation in barnyard animals and dogs to human dominion was largely driven by artificial selection, the original domestic cat was a product of natural selection."

- From wild animals to domestic pets, an evolutionary view of domestication

https://www.pnas.org/content/106/Supplement_1/9971

I thought nuclear was many times safer than hydro, especially if you compare the fatalities from the Chernobyl disaster to the Banqiao dam.

Hopefully more countries start reprocessing spent nuclear fuel the way the French do, though this does raise proliferation concerns.

Why do so many people out there keep harping on nuclear? Are they willing to pay for it? No. They'll be the first ones complaining when their rates shoot through the roof.

Look, if you want nuclear power, then the government will need to finance it. Some of these other sources are at 1-2 cents a kWh, how is a private investor supposed to finance a nuclear power plant that competes with those rates? Even if there were no safety or environmental regulations at all, you still couldn't get there. I'm sorry, but there exists no private investor dumb enough to finance a power generation facility that expensive, that would reside that far down the dispatch stack. It just won't happen.

> Even if there were no safety or environmental regulations at all, you still couldn't get there

I am not so sure. I mean, if you really do not have to care about safety and waste, how expensive it can be to dig up uranium, centrifuge it for enrichment and mold it to a shape that heats stuff around it?

Ask the Indians and Pakistanis, it's not at all cheap. Certainly something that only a state would take on. It's just beyond the capacity of most private investment groups. It would really require government backing to make it happen.

SpaceX for nuclear fission is an unsettling thought.

I think people prefer less risky now. Now that faith is partially gone, living in fear of catastrophy is worse than lower energy production.

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