Hacker News Reader

Comment by quelsolaar | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear is not a viable solution, due to public opinion.

A nuclear reactor has an incident once every 10.000 years. If we divide that with the number of reactors we get an accident every 30 or so years. (Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Fukusima, ligns up well with that)

Every time there is an accident, the public turns against nuclear for 5-10 years. Add to that that it takes a decade to plan and build a reactor, and you realize that once we double or triple the number of reactors, accidents will be so frequent, that the public wont stand for additional expansion within the time it takes to build more reactors.

We need 10x nuclear to solve global warming. Thats a major accident every 3 years or so. Yes, Nuclear can be made safer, but probably not by as much as needed. Even a country like Japan, who has high safety standards, and a historical heritage of nuclear fallout, has had an accident, and most new reactors are likely to be built by China who has less then stellar safety record.

View on HN

Just a month before Chernobyl happened, the staff at the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II in Idaho successfully demonstrated something new and incredible: passive shutdown. They had the reactor at full power and killed the pumps. It shut down and started cooling itself with natural circulation (no external/backup power needed). No control rods were inserted. This state would last indefinitely. Then they did it again, this time cutting off the heat sink. Same result [1]. This was the ultimate energy source. But we all turned our backs on this team. Clinton cut funding in '94 and the reactor shut down.

Advanced low-pressure reactors can do this, and eliminating loss-of-decay-heat-removal accidents takes the probability of a large early release well into the 10^-7 or even 10^-8 range according to probabilistic risk assessments.

So even though nuclear is, by the actuarial tables, almost as safe as you can get in energy systems, you're right that the public opinion is a big hurdle and that Fukushimas are not acceptable. These low-pressure designs get us there, and it's been demonstrated.

Molten salt reactors, liquid metal cooled reactors, and some gas cooled reactors all have this capability. It's basically the main event of what the nuclear industry called Gen IV reactors [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBR-II#Passive_safety

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

I wonder why nuclear rectors were ever built without the ability to shutdown passively in case of power and equipment failure.

Because as a society we continually overestimate our ability to control nature. i.e. "We have multiple layers of redundancy. It's all under control."

Which is true, until it isn't.

Normal reactors do shut down when the power fails. the control rods lose power and fall in. The hard part is cooling the reactor afterwards due to nuclear decay heat. Normal reactors use double-redundant super-reliable diesel generators to do this. This works fine until you out your diesel in the basement in a tsumani zone. Ebr-2 can shut down without CR insertion (crazy robust, CRs always go in) and then can cool itself without external power.

> Normal reactors use double-redundant super-reliable diesel generators to do this.

Relying on diesel generators is not a passive solution. That is basically the part where I wonder why not a passive solution was picked.

We'll have to go deeper in to the history and physics. The first reactor was passively cooled by air. It was very low power and didn't split very many atoms, so the nuclear decay heat was low after shutdown. Many reactors have been made that cool with natural circulation of air or water but they're all low power. Quickly, the Manhattan Project came along and the military wanted enough plutonium to make an atomic bomb to fight the Nazis. They built a reactor that could do this out at Hanford (the B reactor). They realized that to make enough plutonium, they'd have to increase the rates of the reactions that produce it. This required splitting more atoms, which released more heat, which required more cooling. They quickly went past the regime where it was possible to use natural circulation with the known coolants at the time (air, water) so they used forced flow, eventually passing the heat into the Columbia River.

Fast forward to the 1950s. Admiral Rickover wants nuclear powered submarines to effectively fight the Russians in the Cold War. Submarines are small but want high power, on the order of a few hundred megawatts. This puts them beyond natural circ decay heat removal regime for air and water. So he builds them, and installs appropriate redundant backup systems.

Now Eisenhower has given the Atoms for Peace speech and the commercial industry is starting. They can build a compact high power reactor or large low power reactor (recall it's a heat removal issue). They choose compact, high-power one modeled after the Naval reactors. They were running great and had a whole supply chain. The low-power ones would be orders of magnitude more expensive per kWh.

Meanwhile, starting in the late 1940s and continuing for a few decades, exotic-coolant reactors were developed, with things like Mercury, liquid sodium metal, molten salt, organics, aqueous homogeneous slurry, etc. These reactors can do high power compact cores with passive natural circ. Many were built and operated. But they remained exotic and underdeveloped. The Navy and commercial nukes had built up an infrastructure and experience base. Exotic reactors were more expensive and the LWRs were fine instead of passively-cooled ones.

Today, dozens of startup companies have dug up the paperwork on these exotic reactors and are rushing to try to develop them and associated supply chains to build them cheaply.

So that's how we ended up with the reactors we have.

No, nuclear is sadly not a viable solution, due to cost. If nuclear were affordable it would be pushed through regardless of opposition. But it has just not worked out.

The people with the money saw what happened at Vogtle and Summer (and also at Flamanville, Olkiluoto, Hinkley Point). Those efforts to make nuclear affordable failed spectacularly, even with public and government support. Westinghouse and Areva were just unable to execute.

This failure should not have been a surprise, as it mirrored what happened in the last big nuclear construction boom. That didn't stop because of accidents; it stopped because the nuclear plants in that boom experienced substantial cost overruns (i.e., the nuclear vendors were not honest about what the technology would actually cost.)

Half the article was about the reasons costs are so much higher in the U.S. than South Korea, and how to fix it.

We've heard that sort of thing for decades. How many more times does Lucy have to pull the football away before you catch on?

To be fair, the US never did any of the things that we now know make nuclear cheap. Standard design, experienced workforce, established supply chain. Until we try those things you can't quite say Lucy has been pulling the football.

There's a really awesome way of getting all this: build nuclear reactors in shipyards.

I never buy the cost problem. I mean look at France. That's another great example. Has some of the cheapest electricity and is 75% nuclear.

Electricity in France is not "one of the cheapest", it is average in Europe and quickly rising. Moreover part of the total related costs (R&D...) was historically paid by the taxpayer. Future decommission and waste-management costs may lead to a financial disaster (take a look at decommission costs in the UK).

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Olkiluoto was not an exercise to make nuclear power affordable. The company was granted with a permission to build a single reactor, the first permit in decades, so they chose the most powerful one available, a first of its kind.

With all the overruns, it has certainly proved to be an expensive build. However, it's all been done with private money, unlike the so called cheap renewables that cost the public hundreds of millions in subsidies.

> Even a country like Japan, who have high safety standards

Reading about TEPCO’s management of their facilities and people both before and after the Fukushima accident doesn’t really mesh with this claim.

Quite, TEPCO was a shitshow.

These guys had the right idea: https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/onagawa-the-japanese-nuclear...

Not to mention the small nuclear waste issue.

Managing waste for a period far, far, far longer than any state has historically lasted continuously (or even since the dawn of human civilization) seems really optimistic.

Very few states have lasted continuously more than a few centuries without some kind of partial or total collapse (military defeat, revolution, bankruptcy of government, etc), ant these waste will need to be managed for thousands of years.

And all of this waste management run by the government is another government subvention of nuclear technology of right now unknown height.

The consensus solution to nuclear waste is to put it in geologic repositories where it will be safely out of the biosphere until well after it decays to stability.

This issue of a toxic but carefully handled substance is very small compared to the looming threat of climate change.

As far as I'm aware, commercial nuclear waste in storage has never injured a single person.

Is there any geologic repository in existance and operating though? At least in Europe, I am aware of none. Even worse, the one in Germany, which was used for a limited amount of waste (Schachtanlage Asse) got flooded by water and the cleanup cost of that has been estimated to be 6 billion. If there are no cost overruns...

Well there's WIPP. [1]

In Europe, Finland has one under construction, not in operation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

>As far as I'm aware, commercial nuclear waste in storage has never injured a single person

You'd be surprised:

By October several thousand shipments were illegally dumped at the landfill in north St. Louis County, in violation of federal standards; they contained an estimated 43,000 tons of radioactive uranium processing wastes and contaminated soil. (...) No strangers to advanced statistical tools, within two years, Wright, an accountant, and Schanzenbach, an economics professor at Northwestern University, documented 700 cases of cancers and immune system diseases within a four-square-mile area. Some of these cancers have a one-in-a-million chance of occurring. (...) Wright and Schanzenbach updated their survey and reported in August 2015 that the number of diseases, including rare cancers, had increased to 2,725 cases.

Or how about:

A few days before I visited the rather scruffy Hospital of Saint Anna and Saint Sebastian in Caserta, southern Italy, a boy aged 11 arrived complaining of headaches. Doctors feared the worst – and sure enough, he was rapidly diagnosed as another child with brain cancer. Some of these young patients arrive in agonising pain, others mystified by falling over all the time; they do not know that lethal tumours are swelling up inside their heads. Yet more turn up with cancer in their blood, their bones, their bladders. There are so many cases that not all can be treated in the hospitals of Campania, a largely rural region. (...) Tosti explained that the Mafia dumped huge quantities of contaminated industrial waste there, then obtained backdated permission for their actions. (...) A criminal investigation was launched 18 months ago, but local people do not expect convictions. This was far from an isolated incident. (...) There are thousands of similar dumps all over this once-paradisiacal slice of Italy: in canals and caves, in quarries and wells, under fields and hills, beneath roads and properties.

Or worse:

Fonti said he had been involved in sinking three vessels, and that the 'Ndrangheta made millions of pounds illegally dumping radioactive and other toxic waste from businesses in Italy and other parts of Europe. A regional prosecutor, Bruno Giordano, said that if the exploration of the wreck does produce evidence of toxic waste, authorities will start a hunt for more sunken vessels. They believe there could be up to 32 in Italian waters. The introduction of more stringent environmental legislation in the 1980s made illegal waste disposal a lucrative business for organised crime groups in Italy. "The problem of ships loaded with radioactive waste and sunk deliberately is an Italian mystery that should have been resolved years ago," said Ermete Realacci, an opposition MP.

What are the sources?

Acute high-dose radiation is a significant health hazard. We know this from atomic bomb survivors, the Chernobyl first-responders, and some other instances, and it's horrible.

However, lots of people have gone around into low radiation zones and found really sick people with horrible diseases, and claimed it was linked to the radiation. What they haven't done is linked those diseases to low-dose radiation with anything near scientific rigor. It's very often just confirmation bias. "There's low-dose radiation here, and cancer, therefore low-dose radiation caused this cancer."

I'm not saying we have enough data to show that low-dose radiation causes no cancer. It just doesn't cause an easily-measurable amount, if any. A counterexample is places like Ramsar, Iran, where the natural background radiation is 80x higher than average. Would you guess that the cancer rate is higher than average?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Mazandaran#Radioactivi...

In the US, public opinion has nearly nothing to do with the lack of new construction. The problem is far simpler here: nobody can build a reactor reliably without going vastly over budget, or off schedule. Going off schedule also means going off budget because costs are front loaded over the 40-60 year lifespan and therefore every year of delay costs massive amounts of interest.

There are plenty of viable sites for nuclear in the US where the local population is eager and willing, usually where there's already a nuclear power plant and it forms a strong economic force for the area. The NRC can't wait to approve more reactors and is doing its best to come up with new ways to certify safety.

So why wasn't nuclear built? Project management failures in the 1970s, combined with utility management far overestimating demand, led to a glut of reactors that were gigantic losses for those trying to build them. This was happening before TMI and Chernobyl turned more public opinion against nuclear. There's a great historical article about this management failure from the 1980 in Forbes that is escaping my web searches at the moment, but the massive financial losses taught the money guys to stay the hell away from nuclear.

Fast forward to the 2000s, there's a renewed push to build more reactors, especially as the current fleet ages and will need to be retired. Nobody wants to do it, because of massive financial risk for little gain. Finally, regulatory capture of the Georgia and North Carolina state legislatures enables bills so that the utitlties socialize all risks of construction failure into their ratepayers, while keeping the profits privatized. Only in that remarkable situation would any utility be willing to take on the insane risk of trying to build a reactor. Four were attempted, two have been abandoned, and North Carolina electricity customers pay something like an average of $20/month on their bill for reactors that will never get completed. Georgia is behind schedule, 2x-3x over budget at the moment, with no end in sight of the cost overruns.

So it's not public opinion that kills nuclear, it's nuclear construction that kills nuclear, at least in the US. We do not build massive projects well, and it blows out any sort of competitive nature for nuclear.

Even if nuclear costs 5x renewables stored in energy, there may still be a financial case for it being a part of a grid, just as peaker plants right now cost much more than, say, combined cycle gas turbines. But it seems unlikely that the massive GW+ reactors of yore will be attempted again any time soon. "Small" modular reactors in the 50MW range will be attempted next, even though in the past these were disregarded as too small to be cost effective. We shall see what their costs end up being, but the best I've been able to glean from news articles is that it's about the cost of Vogtle's new construction in Georgia, I.e. not going to be price competitive with batters and renewables in 10-15 years.

Building nuclear right now is a massively expensive bet on a technology that gets more expensive the more experience we have with it. Meanwhile it's competitors are getting cheaper every day. There may be a spot for it in the future grid, but only if it's boosters focus on nuclear's true problems rather than wasting effort on excuses that are not truly blocking the tech.

> There's a great historical article about this management failure from the 1980 in Forbes that is escaping my web searches at the moment

https://www.backissues.com/issue/Forbes-February-11-1985

Part of this came down to the logic of pursuing economies of scale. It costs a lot to build a 750MW plant, but not twice as much to build a 1500MW plant. So the utilities leaned towards bigger plants (for everything, not just nuclear).

But bigger plants take longer, overall. That means you need more capacity in the development pipeline, because you're forecasting that the market is growing. Soon you're needing to have finance and regulatory movement for multiple gigawatts of capacity at all times to keep up with what you think is coming.

If you then find you've overshot demand, you are in an ugly position.

Utilities that did the "dumb" thing and prioritised smaller plants, which are ostensibly more expensive per kwh, tended to do better because they didn't need to tie up so much capital at any given time. Bringing a gigawatt online in five years as a single plant is very different from bringing 200MW a year online. Especially if it turns out in the third year that 600MW was as much as the market wanted to buy.

Yes, that's a great point to bring up. Nuclear, as it's been deployed so far, doesn't scale very well. In contrast, renewables are deplorable at basically any scale desired, without nearly as many one time costs. Transmission is the biggie, of course, but nuclear has the same issue when it's trying to connect the grid to a gigantic thermal dump like a river or ocean.

>If we divide that with the number of reactors we get an accident every 30 or so years

Plus the ones we had were happy accidents thus far. We could have much worse, and they also involve terrorism and other such motives.

Plus disposing toxic byproducts that last almost forever (and which we regularly dump on the lowest bidder to take care off).

Lastly, to do nuclear properly costs too much. If it weren't for huge subsidies it wouldn't be viable...

That assumes the technology won't get much better. But there are a ton of potential ways to improve nuclear, like LFTR.

Just like renewables getting better.

So why even bother with that old, dangerous and radioactive tech?

I really hope the lobby runs out of money soon...this artificial hype is terrible.

Old? Unlocking the energy of the nucleus is certainly our most recent energy resource, by any measure.

Dangerous? Even though nuclear fails catastrophically, it does so very infrequently, and few people die relative to other energy sources (hydro dam failures have killed 100k in one incident, coal kills more each day than nuclear ever killed). Nuclear safety per TWh is on par with wind and solar (which kill very few people e.g. from ice throw and falling off roofs).

Radioactive? Ok, fission products are radioactive. Can't argue with that.

Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby?

>Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby

No, he's just safely away from any fallout, hugely optimistic, naive about government competence and private sector morality (e.g. in cutting corners), and perfectly fine to rush technology and just wait and see the consequences and let the second order effects and externalities be suffered by others (which has nothing to do with science per se)...

> Old? Unlocking the energy of the nucleus is certainly our most recent energy resource, by any measure.

Old as in "outdated".

> hydro dam failures have killed 100k in one incident

Yeah flooding are surely more dramatic than a slow death through cancer, I give you that...and it's such a good selling point isn't it? You just can't see it or put a finger on it. Some numbers are far less dramatic then a flood. Too bad Netflix comes with that documentary on Chernobyl now. Need to pay for some more op-eds to cover that up.

> Do you really think Steven Pinker is in the nuclear lobby?

Do you have to be part of the lobby if you take the money? And I doubt it came from Goldstein or his publishers just to promote his book. The timing of the whole nuclear hype is just too coincidental.

Nuclear hype is timeless, it's caused by the fact that there are 2 million times more Joules in each kg of uranium than in any chemical fuel. This natural resource is astounding, and it's a very human thing to try to put it to work for the good of humankind.

Anti-nuclear media is also status quo. The industry has been dealing with it for decades. I don't think the HBO thing is going to tip the scale too much. There are documentaries about plane crashes too, yet we still fly.

The key point I don't think you granted me is that the numbers are in, and nuclear is definitively and quantitatively a very safe form of energy. Certainly the perception is not in line with this, but if you look at the numbers it's clear.

Thus we have a public education issue.

> Nuclear hype is timeless

The only timeless thing about nuclear is the the waste. Something many future generations can have to be pissed about us.

Nobody was talking about nuclear for years before that new hype started a few months ago and suddenly it's allover the place. Come on...

> Thus we have a public education issue.

No we don't and painting the opposition to the hype as stupid or uneducated only hurts nuclear. It's been a constant mistake by the nuclear lobby throughout their history and it's one more reason why the hype will fail in the end. The lobby can scream as loud as they want it won't be louder as the rapid development in renewables and the unwillingness of the whole world to invest into a dead technology nobody outside the hype wants. The investors jumped off already years ago. Get over it.

There are hundreds of millions of dollars per year going into advanced nuclear from big investors right now in the USA. Check out Kairos, USNC, TerraPower, etc.

https://www.thirdway.org/graphic/keeping-up-with-the-advance...

I am not painting opposition as stupid. I'm painting the general public as unaware that nuclear is statistically quite safe compared with almost all other energy sources.

There is almost no nuclear lobby to speak of. Nuclear advocacy is almost all grassroots.

https://www.iea.org/tcep/power/nuclear/ Why would you even invest in anything that looks like that? Especially compared to the curves here: https://www.iea.org/tcep/power/renewables/

Meanwhile at the construction sites: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-pro... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/03/fate-of-...

> There is almost no nuclear lobby to speak of. Nuclear advocacy is almost all grassroots.

You have to be kidding me. Even if you somehow missed the recent hype driven by people like Michael Shellenberger, you can't assume that a billion dollar industry in decline has no lobby and is "grassroots".

> Why would you even invest in anything that looks like that?

You'll have to ask Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and some others why they invested in advanced nuclear. I suspect you'll hear something about how nuclear can produce low-footprint 24/7 carbon-free energy in sites all over the world.

Certainly I wouldn't expect a traditional investor to invest in nuclear to make a buck. It's mostly people who are trying to build a safe and prosperous world and believe nuclear can help us get there.

> you can't assume that a billion dollar industry in decline has no lobby and is "grassroots".

Sure I can. This industry has no pure-nuclear stakeholders. All the owner/operators are utilities, which have vast fossil, wind, solar resources to operate. The utility executives don't give two shoots about nuclear, they only see bottom lines in current markets. Among the vendors, GE is largely divesting from nuclear to make gas and wind turbines. I've seen pro-nuclear advertising, but only in France. I've never seen pro-nuclear advertising in the USA. You see wind and natural gas ads all over the damn place. If there were a functional nuclear lobby, you could probably point me to at least one pro-nuclear advertisement on TV. Can you?

I personally know a lot of grassroots nuclear advocates:

* https://mothersfornuclear.org/ -- a bunch of moms who worked at nuclear plants and wanted to tell people that they were actually good

* Seattle Friends of Fission: https://seattlefof.org/ -- a couple local grandparents who heard about nuclear wanted to spread the news of its low-carbon capabilities to other Seattle environmentalists.

* https://whatisnuclear.com -- a bunch of ~2006-era nuclear graduates who were trying to spread information about nuclear to help with climate change. Disclaimer: I founded this one so I know the story very well.

* https://www.generationatomic.org/ -- a few Minnesota folks who learned about nuclear and dedicated their efforts to it

* https://energyfromthorium.com/ -- a NASA tech named Kirk in Alabama who read an old book, got crazy excited, single-handedly rallied thousands of people with excitement about thorium, started a company, and recently got awarded a DOE voucher to develop his tech. If you've heard of Thorium, it's because of this guy, and it's about as grassroots as it gets.

The actual nuclear lobby group (NEI) is funded almost entirely by utilities who will rarely allow them to explain nuclear advantages over either fossil or renewables (because all the stakeholders have interests in those). They do good work, but it's not as targeted or hard-hitting as you might expect from a typical lobby group.

> You'll have to ask Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and some others why they invested in advanced nuclear.

I would but they are probably not likely to talk about it anymore. Because...you know...it went so well ;)

> I've never seen pro-nuclear advertising in the USA.

Sure you did. You comment underneath it. People like Michael Shellenberger need to be payed too.

Btw, thanks for giving even more arguments to why nuclear is on the away out in this paragraph.

> I personally know a lot of grassroots nuclear advocates:

Omg lol. The first two look like this John Oliver episode about fake grassroots pages. I mean what is this?

whatisnuclear is a guy who works for TerraPower.

> a few Minnesota folks who learned about nuclear and dedicated their efforts to it

I'm sure they are making nationwide impact paying for NYT and WP op-eds no wait...they probably are just like you and those fan boys here and not even relevant to the topic.

And last but not least THE NASA (uhuuuu!) guy with his "just around the corner" Thorium Reactor touring tedX talks I'm sure he has absolutely no money left to pay for this hype too.

So I don't know what you point was with this hilarious list but you seem to have missed mine and as I'm on cool down here for my contribution against this circle jerk, please consider reading my posts slowly so your answers make it worth being regarded.

Thorium reactors?

Thorium is an alternate fuel that can be used in breeder reactors with fast or slow neutrons. It's particularly well-suited for thermal breeders, which work best in fluid fuel systems. Fluid fuel systems (like the now internet-famed Molten Salt Reactor) have lots of great capabilities that fall into the broader category of Gen-IV nuclear reactors (near infinite sustainability, super-safe, reduced waste, higher temperature, etc.).

There was some internet hype for a while that Thorium was a end-all/be-all but those were slightly misguided in the sense that all Gen-IV reactors are end-all/be-alls. The Thorium itself had very little to do with it. It was an attempt at rebranding nuclear. As a nuclear engineer I prefer precision and promote all Gen-IV stuff including Th-fueled ones. Maybe I should have gone with the rebrand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com