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Comment by andness | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you that I don't think we can make nuclear safe. But if the choice seems to be between millions of deaths from global warming or thousands of deaths from nuclear, isn't the latter vastly preferable? Shouldn't we set out and build out nuclear to steer us away from the edge, and then worry about better solutions once we're safe?

I suspect the reason people don't buy this argument is that they don't truly believe global warming is as bad as they say. We have a history of solving problems in the past, so we'll solve this one too. There's no need to panic.

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Can you provide a timeline and justification on "millions of deaths from global warming".

Why can't be invest the money in better alternatives and save the same "millions of lives" with actually sustainable tech that doesn't produce what you are describing as "thousands of deaths"

The book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas is a good start. It has extensive references to peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change.

We've already had thousands of deaths from heat waves that probably wouldn't have happened in the absence of global warming. By three degrees warming we'll have massive food shortages and hundreds of millions of climate refugees.

I find a lot of anti-nuclear renewables advocates really underestimate the scale of the problem we're facing. This book is a great start to seeing what we're really up against.

How much money and time would it take to research battery technology that could put coal and nuclear plants out of business?

We know how to build nuclear NOW. Let's do it. We can turn all the plants of the second someone finds out to store terawatts of power produced by renewable means in a cost-effective manner that doesn't rely on some geological anomalies.

I bet, we will develop that technology in much much shorter time than we need to store nuclear waste.

There’s little need to store nuclear waste. Reprocess it and use the remaining fuel.

This does nothing to the fission products. And reprocessing only lets you destroy the actinides if you burn them in a fast reactor. Fast reactors have, so far, been even more expensive than thermal reactors.

That's only because the US stopped all R&D on them under Carter.

Again, the only reason we're not all nuclear today is because of politics.

Fast reactors have been disappointing all over the world. The harder neutron spectrum is more damaging to materials, and liquid sodium has serious drawbacks. Fabrication of fuel elements with mixed actinides is also difficult. Fast reactors also require a higher density of fuel (due to the lower fission cross section at high neutron energy), which presents safety issues.

The French reprocess all their fuel as I understand it. We could do the same, we choose not to.

That's probably the wrong choice.

The french choice was clearly the wrong one. It's a net economic loss for them. It was predicated on the use of the separated Pu in fast reactors, but their experience with fast reactors was dismal.

It's not about whether it makes money.

It's a way to drastically reduce the waste from the process.

If they weren't going to use the plutonium immediately, reprocessing was stupid. Spending the money they didn't have to, in order to make Pu they didn't need, just to have the Pu sit around, made no economic sense. And no, it doesn't improve the economics of waste disposal.

Understand where reprocessing came from. Way back then, the story was that nuclear was going to be dirt cheap, but would ultimately be limited by the cost of uranium. The solution was breeding, to provide all the expensive fuel those thousands of cheap reactors would need. Reprocessing was needed to close this fuel cycle.

But this story bears no resemblance to reality. Reactors turned out to be expensive, the number of installed reactors was far below projections, and uranium is not in short supply.

One still hears echoes of this old narrative from people who don't really understand where it came from, and why it doesn't apply.

Again, the point isn't to save money. The point is to reduce waste.

No, the point is to minimize the cost of dealing with waste. Reprocessing doesn't do that.

But let's stipulate that they want to destroy the waste. What's the cheapest way to do that? If they wait to reprocess the fuel, and destroy the actinides in the future, it comes out cheaper than if they reprocess now. That's because reprocessing, and developing and building fast reactors, is quite expensive, and the net present value of that cost is minimized by moving it off into the future. Moreover, reprocessing becomes easier as the fuel cools off.

So, reprocessing NOW is a pointless waste of money, even if ultimately you want to do it. The ONLY reason you'd want to reprocess now was if you needed the actinides now for use in energy generation. And no one needs them for that.

No. You're missing the point of the entire discussion.

The point is to deal with the waste. The whole argument is that we can't go to nuclear power because "waste". So deal with it.

No one cares about the cost of it -- it's far cheaper to deal with it now than to manage it for a thousand years anyway -- especially in political capital with a bunch of nimbys who think nuclear power is scary.

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