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Comment by trimbo | Hacker News Reader

Sigh.

I've been arguing this for so long, and gave up about 5 years ago. I can't think of a more scalable way than fission to combat carbon, yet it won't happen for so many reasons.

* There are too many solar and wind success stories to point to. "Why can't NYC be like Scotland with wind power?!" You start to list the reasons and the response is "we can accomplish it if we put our minds to it!". It's an endless cycle of optimistic non-problem-solving.

* No politician will back nuclear. If there's an accident, they'll be run out of town. Not worth the risk.

* Along the same lines, there is zero interest in technology research/investment. This became obvious when they shut down reprocessing in the 70s and IFR was shut down in the 90s. And the reprocessing ban was by a President who happened to be a nuclear engineer! If he won't do it, who will?

* The scare-mongering in the media over accidents is impossible to overcome. There's no way to have a rational discussion when all someone has to do is point to the endless exclusion zone documentaries to win their argument.

* And then much of the blame needs to be shared by the nuclear engineers. They had decades to make nuclear safer before TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima (1942 -> 1970s, 80s, 2010s). And yet, here we are, with the same light water reactors that Rickover speced out in the 50s! Yes, I get that has something to do with building restrictions since TMI... so how about before that?

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The overall incredible ignorance around nuclear is staggering. If you ask the average person how many people have died as a result of the Chernobyl incident, they’re usually going to estimate high by orders of magnitude. In general what people don’t understand about radiation is effectively everything about it, and worse, they don’t want to know. Meanwhile trying to explain how many million die each and every year from burning hydrocarbons rolls right off them. It’s pathetic and infuriating and I’ve also given up completely.

And then much of the blame needs to be shared by the nuclear engineers. They had decades to make nuclear safer before TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima (1942 -> 1970s, 80s, 2010s). And yet, here we are, with the same light water reactors that Rickover speced out in the 50s! Yes, I get that has something to do with building restrictions since TMI... so how about before that?

It has to do with fuck all investment, a dead regulatory environment, and inability to test new designs at scale. For all the other reasons you mentioned the investment isn’t there. I’d add that the waste issue is seen by most of the public as technically insurmountable, whereas in fact it’s technically simple, but politically insurmountable. At this point you’d need it to be the platform issue for a popular president, along with a truly huge education initiative and a lot of arm-twisting in the senate. It would cost a fortune, but less than the inevitable disaster were hurtling toward without nuclear.

Unfortunately even on a site like HN, optimism about renewables and new tech combines with ignorance of nuclear power; how can we expect better from the average American?

Maybe this is an issue that could garner bipartisan support, even if for different motivations? Instead of trying to bring back coal, we should be trying to reinvigorate the nuclear power industry. Maybe even turn some of those coal miners in to Uranium miners :)

More like uranium refiners. Uranium occurs at a relatively common rate at or near the surface (forget the specifics). Yes, it’s absolutely the energy we should be using. But our first use of nuclear blew up two cities. It will forever be marred by its first impression.

Nuclear power is cost prohibitive. Additionally, it's hard to predict and account for that one-in-a-million catastrophe that creates a nuclear wasteland. The sample size is too small.

Nuclear power is cost prohibitive.

Really, because it’s widely employed around the world. If you have some evidence that it’s “cost prohibitive” though I’d love to see it. Evidence mind you, not flat declarations devoid of substance.

Additionally, it's hard to predict and account for that one-in-a-million catastrophe that creates a nuclear wasteland. The sample size is too small.

Many decades and thousands of reactors on land and naval applications with only a few notable disasters beg to differ. I’m also curious where this “wasteland” comment is coming from. The worst nuclear disaster, one singular in its extremity, has led to something far from a wasteland, although quite a few people had to be relocated.

Either way, trading in the known mass casualtiesin the millions per annum, and environmental catastrophe of burning hydrocarbons, for scaremongering “what if’s” so profoundly out of touch with reality as yours is the falsest of dilemmas. The total death toll from everything nuclear, including weapons can’t match a year of deaths and illness from burning coal. Never mind mining coal, drilling for oil and transporting it and the associated sociopolitical disaster of the Middle East, the environmental harm of fracking, and the sheer stupidity of not addressing climate change now.

A weaker statement than a flat out "nuclear power is cost prohibitive": current-gen nuclear power seems to be having serious cost problems, even in countries that previously successfully built out nuclear, and even where there is a relatively favorable political environment. Whether this is due to fundamental reasons or not is of course another question.

One example is the new-generation Électricité de France EPR design, where the first unit scheduled to be completed, at Flamanville, is way late and over budget. France has almost 100% nuclear power and has both a good safety and cost record historically, so the seeming lack of success of this project has dismayed many people: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-flamanville/edfs-flam...

It's not quite as positive a political environment overall, but Westinghouse also had strong local and state-level support for its new unit in Georgia (the U.S. state), but ended up going bankrupt after cost overruns: https://www.ajc.com/business/power-seeks-best-path-forward-p...

Obviously cost overruns at two plants is a very small sample size, so it could be due to non-fundamental features, like severe mismanagement. But given that there aren't that many large-scale projects going on, the two biggest Western ones both running into major trouble has really hurt prospects for more funding/support. If even one of these had been a clear success, the outlook would be much better.

In my locality, a glut of natural gas is putting pressure on Nuclear costs. They simply can't compete because NG is so plentiful.

>The worst nuclear disaster, one singular in its extremity, has led to something far from a wasteland

I believe the phrase you are looking is "wildlife sanctuary". By far the biggest effect that nuclear disasters have on the environment is their function as a human repellent.

Nuclear power is cost prohibitive.

How about: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36160368?

For the cost to be prohibitive, it only really needs to be dearer than an alternative that's at least as good. That alternative is now wind: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41220948.

Or this:

https://thebulletin.org/2013/03/how-to-close-the-us-nuclear-...

Wind is not a like-for-like replacement for nuclear. The amount of land wind would need to replace just one nuclear reactor is many orders of magnitude greater.

Renewables must be supported by a reliable base-load supply, which effectively means you need to choose between either nuclear or fossil fuels.

1. The amount of land or sea, which latter makes for a dearer installation but is much easier to find in densely populated countries like the UK.

2. My understanding is that, sure, you can't have a grid that runs purely on wind, but you can go a lot higher than we currently do without much trouble. The issue with massive new nuclear is that outages can take a sizeable percentage of your generation off-grid unexpectedly at a moment's notice (Hinkley will I believe represent 7% of UK grid capacity), which in a sense is a worse intermittency problem than you get with renewables (which tend to ramp up and down more smoothly and broadly in line with weather forecasts). Also, battery storage can help.

This won't be the case with modern reactor designs. Previous designs were based on an approach that is fundamentally unstable and thus requires a huge investment in safety critical systems to keep things in line.

Newer designs are fundamentally stable and fail in an inherently safe manner. Much, much less surrounding infrastructure and a greatly reduced need for system level fixes to problems since the catastrophic issues have been designed out.

It will take some time to turn the ship, but it is our best chance for producing 24 hour scalable power that is also carbon safe. Just search "modern nuclear reactor design" and start honestly reading the literature with an open mind.

A couple of random articles (plenty more available): https://www.technologyreview.com/s/512321/safer-nuclear-powe... http://science.time.com/2013/08/05/amidst-economic-and-safet...

Plenty of great information out there for anyone interested in letting go of their preconceived ideas and exploring the amazing work that is happening now.

The new designs are not going to be available for many years. They have to be proved in operation, particularly if they involve new chemistry like MSRs.

By the time they're proven, renewables will have expanded to global dominance and likely run down their experience curves to cost points that even Gen IV nuclear will find very hard to beat.

New nuclear designs are a hedge against renewables suddenly stopping getting cheaper. An insurance policy, but hopefully one that won't be needed.

> The overall incredible ignorance around nuclear is staggering. If you ask the average person how many people have died as a result of the Chernobyl incident, they’re usually going to estimate high by orders of magnitude.

Downplaying it doesn't help either.

In France the medias and politicians repeated again and again that the radioactive cloud didn't cross the border. Not only lying for such a thing is disgusting, but it's also moronic to think people would believe it.

Decades later, now have a decent overview of the increase of thyroid cancer near the border in the years after the incident. I have a friend that had his life shattered because of it.

I'm pro nuclear, but every time there is that much on the line, those in charge stop respecting the people, so of course it's going to create strong opposition.

How do you want to establish any kind of trust in the technology if when there is a catastrophy, you make sure to betray the victims ?

Everytime there is a problem, the authorities pretend everything is under control. Not it's not. If it had been, we woudln't have had the accident in the first place.

Honesty would be to have very mediatic continuous monitoring of the situtations for the next 10 years. The president should state every year an honest status on the matter. We all know fukushima is still leaking in the ocean radioactive materials: following the impact of it should be not only transparent, but vocal, and honest.

Nobody respect kids hidding after they fucked up, saying "no I didn't do it".

Nuclear is more of a political problem that a technical one, and we, humans, suck at those.

There are quite a few new companies that are very interested in nuclear R&D. In the U.S. their biggest problem is the NRC.

A couple years ago I got to sit in a meeting between people from over a dozen of these companies, and a former head of the NRC. The reactor people said their biggest problem was that the NRC requires the design to be nearly complete before they'll even look at it. It takes several hundred million dollars to get to that point, then the NRC gives a simple yes or no. If no then you're done, if yes then you've still got nothing but paper. It's a very difficult environment for investors.

They said if the NRC at least went with a more phased approach it would help a lot. The NRC person was unsympathetic, said it wasn't the NRC's job to help promote or develop nuclear power, and was uninterested in climate change.

Fortunately Canada's regulators are more rational. Terrestrial Energy has spoken highly of them, has gotten through the hardest part of their process, and expects to get a molten salt reactor to market within a decade. Moltex has moved to Canada as well, and possibly others.

But it's unfortunate that the U.S. is so difficult, since with facilities like Oak Ridge it could help a lot.

This is as designed. Prior to the anti-nuclear NRC, we had the pro-nuclear AEC. Progress stopped, as intended, when the NRC took over.

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

There's a long shadow in this which isn't very much discussed: nuclear weapons.

Up until the 1990s it was generally accepted that the greatest risk to humanity was not the slow problems of global warning but the near-instant destruction of an exchange of the thousands of ICBM-delivered nuclear warheads possessed by the two-and-a-half superpowers. These weapons depended on a supply of plutonium. Therefore many of the earlier reactors (eg Windscale/Sellafield) were built in a tremendous hurry to ensure enough plutonium.

Conversely, on the other side, environmentalists focused on cutting off the supply of plutonium to weapons. Recall that Greenpeace got started campaigning against nuclear bomb testing. This attracted hostility from governments, up to and including the French DGSE sinking the Rainbow Warrior and murdering the photographer who was on board. This has affected the subsequent debate because there is no trust.

The nuclear trust issue affects which countries are allowed to have nuclear reactors (see Iran, Iraq).

In the 2000s the big question was terrorism: would nuclear plants be vulnerable to attack, including crashed planes, and how could they be secured? Meanwhile a trillion dollars was spent on a largely pointless war, proving which kinds of threats are taken seriously and which aren't.

A plane crash attack is no different than any other type of accident; it can be integrated in the incident response plan (much less dangerous than tsunami). This is not the big problem.

The bigger problem is proliferation. All nuclear power plants produce plutonium from fuel stocks, which goes straight to the waste. Plutonium can be chemically separated from the nuclear waste, which is not quite easy, but much much easier than isotope separation. Thankfully, a single neutron capture transforms Pu-239 to Pu-240, which is unusable in nuclear weapons (if it wasn't the case, human civilization would have ended decades ago), and it is (or was) nearly impossible to separate these two isotopes. To obtain relative pure Pu-239, fuel assemblies or special U-238 rods need to be extracted early in the campaign, which is observable (unless a reactor is specifically designed for that). Unfortunately, modern laser isotope separation methods (spin chemistry, magnetic isotope effects) make it possible to separate Pu-239 from Pu-240. Most of the details are classified, but secrets can work only for a limited time.

I sense some cognitive dissonance here. You want that great carbon-free energy provided by nuclear, and you lament all the reasons it won't happen. Except you have no rebuttal to those reasons and almost sound convinced by their soundness yourself.

- Politicians won't back nuclear because of the risk of accident, thus giving legitimacy to the risk and the public's fears.

- There hasn't been adequate research and advancement in the nuclear industry (and other threads mention the lack of applied design research). So previous scientists and industrials have already determined it's too hard/expensive/difficult. Global warming may change that equation, but it won't make up for lost research.

- So people see the exclusion zones and shouldn't be afraid? We currently have 2 molten reactors with no long term solution found. At what point does the fear become irrational?

- Same point as above: lack of advancement, bad designs, and human mistakes, how can any of these be fixed to allay fears and be operational in time?

- Another comment mentions how storage of waste is a question of will, yet we have pools of it all over, and the underground solution doesn't seem reliable either.

All I hear is that nuclear is the perfect solution if it were perfect and people weren't irrational.

Here's a qustion to help cut through the Gordon knot: at what point is it scientifically rational to accept/shun nuclear?

>Politicians won't back nuclear because of the risk of accident, thus giving legitimacy to the risk and the public's fears.

No, that’s not the case. Politicians won’t back it because of their perceived risk based on their own ignorance. Or, even if they aren’t ignorant, they are focused more on staying in office rather than helping humanity so they don’t take up any projects that the ignorant public might pitchfork about. Neither of these “give legitimacy” to incorrect risk analysis.

A politician being afraid of flying does not give legitimacy to flying fears either. Risk isn’t measured by popularity.

AOC will gain far more popularity from her completely unrealistic green new deal than she ever would proposing something that would actually help based on nuclear. Politicians propose what’s popular, not what’s moral, ethical, or scientifically sound.

>Here's a qustion to help cut through the Gordon knot: at what point is it scientifically rational to accept/shun nuclear?

When peoples’ fears are based on a real understanding/evidence and not their own ignorant imaginations.

See my point about realpolitik above. Politicians more or less reflect the people, for better or for worse. Politicians are also the leaders and deciders, if not them, who else? There is a healthy nuclear industry, lobby, and research, so it's not like nuclear is unfairly excluded from the solutions table. As others have pointed out, cost overruns have sunk many modern nuclear projects.

> real understanding/evidence

Well, where are they? I originally replied to trimbo's comment because he seemed to be pro-nuclear and scientific, but then all his arguments seemed to acknowledge that well, nuclear wasn't up to the task. So where are the rational arguments that nuclear can be a solution?

The argument is that there are no rational reasons for humans not to support nuclear. The only reason it’s “not up to the task” is because humans as a group are behaving incredibly stupidly by ignoring the numbers and murdering people with coal while concern trolling an energy that kills fewer people than your standard annual mass shootings.

So the rational arguments are everywhere. The problem is that people want to clutch onto their irrational fear and believe in eithe the fantasy of non existent climate change or the fantasy of solar/wind storage becoming feasible in 10 years or less.

In other words, as a technical solution there isn’t anything nearly as good. There are no rational arguments against that. It’s arguing with anti-vaxers at this point.

As an actual solution, well how do we deal with the anti-vaxer problem? The same could be applied there.

But there's a very rational reason to not support nuclear: it's too expensive.

I used to support nuclear, but this argument against it has become too strong.

The reason politicians don't back nuclear is because of the way our political system operates.

A politician might believe our nation will need more power plants within the next 20 years. But they're incentivised to do the thing that, relatively, will be best for their near-term re-election prospects.

And just think of all the things that are better for their re-election prospects than a nuclear power plant in their constituency:

* A nuclear power plant in someone else's constituency. Play chicken with keeping the lights on and maybe someone else will swerve!

* Running an existing coal or gas power plant for longer

* A solar or wind power installation. Or better yet, one in someone else's back yard.

* Demand reduction like subsidised LED lightbulbs.

* Vague technology promises, like electric car batteries stabilising the grid.

* Finding of creating some organisation to take the blame once the brownouts and bill increases start.

* Just plain doing nothing and retiring before the bill comes due.

Why risk your job today supporting a nuclear plant, when you can kick the can down the road and keep yourself employed for another 20 years, maybe more?

Politicians are subject to those incentives, and it's hardly realistic to expect them to place the nation's interests above their own. Frankly it's a wonder any infrastructure gets built at all.

No, the reason nuclear is shunned is largely one of cost. Rate payers don't want higher rates. Nuclear has led to huge financial risk displaced to the rate payers, and they don't like it. And they let their politicians know they don't like it.

Well, I think there's more than one reason, corresponding to the multiple points in the posts by trimbo and 205guy.

And one of those reasons is political, independent of finance. I agree other reasons are financial.

The reason I think there are political reasons independent of the financial is because I've seen politicians oppose waste incinerators and windfarms in the face of local opposition, even though they were entirely privately financed.

How are car-to-grid schemes any more unproven than next Gen reactors? You're not helping the side of science with untested hypotheses like that.

But my main point is realpolitik, or like you say "the way our political system operates." We have a political system that has evolved to handle issues in what we think is the least bad way (worst system except for all the others). Is nuclear in its blind spot, or would untested science-ocracy lead to worse outcomes?

When you take into account he amount of energy that has been produced by nuclear power since the 50s, I'd say we have a pretty good record when it comes to overall safety.

I agree with most of your points, however: most of the accidents have more to do with flaws in regulations than mistakes from the nuclear engineers. Chernobyl, which is arguably the worst and most iconic nuclear disaster of all times was mostly caused by a severe violation of procedures. When you take into account he amount of energy that has been produced by nuclear power since the 50s, I'd say we have a pretty good record when it comes to overall safety.

The biggest problem with Chernobyl was the reactor design, which had a positive void coefficient, which outside of something like CANDU reactors is considered insane today. It’s true that their experiment with simulated blackout was the proximal cause, but the fact that increased steam production led to higher power output was the big factor that made it such a huge disaster.

When I learned about Chernobyl reactor, I was surprised how bad the design decisions were. Casing the reactor core in wooden housing?

IIRC the control rods were also bizarre and had graphite bottoms, so the first part of a trip (scram) was adding reactivity.

Prompt critical is prompt.

I believe the rods were graphite, just like the moderators. Of course the problem with that was that by the time they were inserted the reactor was already out of control. All the graphite rods did was burn, which certainly didn’t help matters! Worse, after a while the blocks of graphite used as the moderator also burned, and was difficult to extinguish. What they needed (other than better reactor design) was a ready store of neutron poisons that would have flooded the reactor vessel before rod insertion. Unfortunately, by the time they were using neutron poisons the explosion and fire had already destroyed anything like containment.

Chernobyl didn't have a containment or shield building. Manually disabling the safety systems didn't help.

The control rods had a plug of graphite on their ends, I believe, which made reactivity briefly increase as they were first inserted.

also not helped by the fact that recent plant construction wasn't superbly handled.. delay, additional cost, failure of quality control for main parts..

Sadly I think nuclear energy needs a branding motive. Something that pushes everybody to make it clear, fast, precise and shiny. To instill trust in the eyes of people (that would require 10 years to educate on the physics)

Chernobyl was a "military reactor", ie. could produce plutonium. Normal reactors don't even have the same failure mode possible. So you can blame the accident on the cold war or something, not nuclear in general.

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter7.html

There's a new book out, reviewed recently by the New York Times, that wants to change that perception. "A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow" [1] is co-written by an engineer who lays out the case for nuclear power. The authors think that rapid deployment of nuclear power is the only way to avoid a climate catastrophe.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/books/review/bright-futur...

How rapid is "rapid deployment of nuclear power", given that the plants take decades to build?

1) We can (and should!) build multiple plants in parallel. The sooner we start the better.

2) Countries like South Korea manage to build nuclear plants in around 4 years or so. The secret is that they have standardized on a design, and are building it again and again. There is hope that SMR's will make it easier to produce plants on time and budget, but those are still some years off.

3) Compare how the carbon emissions from electricity production in Germany has changed since they started their "Energiewende" project where they are phasing out nuclear and are deploying a lot of solar and wind. For comparison, look at e.g. the nuclear buildout in France (mostly from the late 1970'ies to the early 1990'ies).

If that is actually true, then we should just hire the South Koreans to build some power plants for us. If that experiment actually produces safe functioning USA-located power plants within budgeted costs, then we can worry about Americans learning to build similar plants.

The South Koreans only build reactors that fast when building in South Korea.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pro...

Barakah 1, built in the UAE by South Korea, was originally supposed to take 5 years, operating in 2017. It has been delayed a couple of times. Bad news from December 2018:

"Cracks found in containment building of UAE nuclear power plant built by S. Korean companies"

http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_internation...

It may still start in 2019. We'll see. But we're already at nearly 7 years.

Also, "countries like South Korea" is a club consisting of South Korea and nobody else. Other countries touted for their continued embrace of nuclear power, like Russia, China, and France, don't build reactors that quickly. If you want information right from the source, use the IAEA's Power Reactor Information System and look at the time between construction start and first grid connection for commercially operating reactors.

Here's France:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

Their newest commercially operating reactor Civaux 2 took 8 years between construction start and grid connection. They have another, Flamanville 3, that will be newer when/if completed, but it has been under construction for 11 years.

Russia:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

Latest commercially operating reactor Leningrad 2-1 took 9 years.

China:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

Newest commercial reactor Hayiang-2 took 8 years.

Very little of what you're talking about there matters.

What matters is that new nuclear reactors have come in grossly over budget. Who is going to buy a reactor when the vendor's promises about cost are demonstrably untrustworthy?

In contrast, new utility scale solar and wind installs typically come in within 10% of estimate.

"No politician will back nuclear. If there's an accident, they'll be run out of town. Not worth the risk."

I would not be so pessimistic (or optimistic, depending on one's stance on this issue).

One does not have to look far in our current political landscape or in the history books to find plenty of examples of politicians doing stupid, unpopular, or even criminal things, that one could argue they should have avoided like the plague before they even started.

When or if those things fail, if the politicians get caught, or if there's some public outcry, it rarely lasts. The news media has a very limited attention span, and when the story is no longer in the media people tend to forget about it. Not only do most people tend to have a poor memory of political events and poor knowledge of history, but protest movements also rarely last long. Many "disgraced" politicians have managed to make a comeback in politics, and be rather popular, if that's what they chose to do.

The government-corporate partnership is also a revolving door where actors frequently move to highly desirable positions from one to the other. It's quite common for politicians to leave politics and get hired in lucrative positions in the companies they regulated, assigned contracts to, or passed legislation on, and for industry execs or lobbyists to get jobs in politics, after which they go back lucrative jobs in the company they left. Companies have many other ways of rewarding politicians who are on their side.

There's every likelihood that politicians who assigned multi-billion-dollar contracts to corporations will be very well taken care of, even in the event of some sort of political firestorm over their decision. Though politicians tend to also be quite adept at covering their asses and pushing the buck to someone else. "I wasn't told". "I didn't know." "I wasn't the one making the decisions." You can't open the papers these days without seeing those words come out of some politician's mouth.

There are few real consequences except in the case of truly egregious crimes, and even then they tend to be not so bad for white-collar crimes. Not to mention that the politicians tend to have top notch legal teams to keep them out of jail -- that's when they're deemed to not be acting in an official capacity, when they effectively can't be sued at all... and good luck suing the federal government.

Of course, in the case of a truly major nuclear disaster, such lawsuits may actually be successful. But if the risk of such a disaster with modern designs really is so low, then these politicians have nothing to worry about, do they?

>And the reprocessing ban was by a President who happened to be a nuclear engineer!

Jimmy Carter was not a nuclear engineer. He began a program to become a nuclear officer but quit before the Seawolf (his anticipated assignment) even began construction. Carter was, however, assigned to assist in the cleanup of a partial meltdown incident in 1952.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter#Naval_career

> I can't think of a more scalable way than fission to combat carbon

I think it's a techno-optimism blindspot to prefer the "make more" solution to these things.

We waste enormous amounts of energy to non-essential things. Not just electricity production. Consider the electric cars craze. It's obviously just going to result in more emissions unless oil extraction ramps down at the same rate.

Solutions involving adaptation to lower consumption are met with protests like "then we would have to change our way of life", and for some reason that's perceived as a good argument.

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