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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

> For example we have yet to see what can happen if a nuclear plant is sabotaged - that's not FUD

That's FUD. What are you proposing is going to happen that would be worse? You can't get a nuclear explosion; the fuel isn't weapons grade. You can get a meltdown and a hydrogen explosion, but that is what happened at Chernobyl. It leaves behind a hot mess and a large cleanup bill but hardly anybody dies. Especially if you're not an obtuse Soviet bureaucracy that dispatches ordinary firefighters to deal with it without adequate training or equipment.

> They consume alot of water resource as well, for cooling.

Water isn't "consumed", it starts off as H2O and ends up that way. It evaporates and then condenses again somewhere downwind.

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The soviet response to Chernobyl was in many respects phenomenal. They mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to risk their lives to mitigate it.

One effort that stands out as "preventing something much worse" is that there was a risk of a potentially larger secondary explosion from steam buildup. They tunneled under the reactor and injected ~25 tons of liquid nitrogen a day (the tunnel started 6 days after the explosion, and was functional 8 days after the explosion). They had people risk/give their lives swimming in to close valves and pumping water out. Dates from here: http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline/

Also, you can absolutely get a nuclear explosion from a reactor, there is some suggestion that Chernobyl might have been a small one in fact (paper): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295450.2017.1...

There were personal heroics but the Soviet response was a catastrophe, it was Sweden that sounded the alarm and the Soviets allowed a May Day parade of children to march through the cloud in Kiev...

"For 36 hours after the explosion, people were given no reliable information about it and left virtually on their own. They never received instructions on how to protect themselves and their children. Radiation levels that according to Soviet laws were supposed to trigger an automatic public warning about the dangers of radiation exposure had already been recorded in the early hours of April 26—but were ignored by one official after another. Finally, people were asked to gather their belongings and wait on the street..." https://www.history.com/news/chernobyl-disaster-coverup

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/remembering-soviet-res...

> One effort that stands out as "preventing something much worse" is that there was a risk of a potentially larger secondary explosion from steam buildup.

A larger conventional explosion would have been linearly worse, not worse rising to a separate category of problem.

> Also, you can absolutely get a nuclear explosion from a reactor, there is some suggestion that Chernobyl might have been a small one in fact (paper)

This is not what I'm referring to. It's one thing to have a "nuclear explosion" in the sense that the reaction generates enough heat to cause the rapid expansion of gasses which is technically an "explosion".

What I'm referring to is the sort of exponential chain reaction that happens in a nuclear weapon, resulting in something on that scale. You have to design for that on purpose to get it. The density and geometry has to be exactly right.

> you can absolutely get a nuclear explosion from a reactor, there is some suggestion that Chernobyl might have been a small one in fact (paper)

An explosion that's too weak to even blow apart its own assembly doesn't count.

"What are you proposing is going to happen that would be worse?"

No offense but if you can't see how Chernobyl or Fukushima could have turned out worse, or that unexpected accidents in other locations could happen and could be worse, you don't understand nuclear power. Its problematic because I expect you have read plenty on it in order to want to defend it in a topic about aforestation.

"Water isn't consumed"

Water resource is consumed, sure it rains again - often far away and into the sea. Fresh water resources are scarce and under pressure in many places, ancient aquifers are drying out, particularly in the US.

> No offense but if you can't see how Chernobyl or Fukushima could have turned out worse, or that unexpected accidents in other locations could happen and could be worse, you don't understand nuclear power.

I can't help but notice the lack of specific examples or explanations of any kind.

> Water resource is consumed, sure it rains again - often far away and into the sea. Fresh water resources are scarce and under pressure in many places, ancient aquifers are drying out, particularly in the US.

Ancient aquifers are drying out as a result of unsustainable resource management and climate change. Nuclear power helps with both of these, the first by providing power for desalination and the second by reducing carbon emissions. The amount of water it evaporates for cooling by comparison is a drop in the bucket. Also, the cooling can be done with seawater to begin with.

"I can't help but notice the lack of specific examples or explanations of any kind"

Because its so simple as saying, "the wind COULD have blown the fukushima fallout southwards over Tokyo instead of relatively promptly into the Pacific." A nuclear accident COULD deliver fallout to a highly populated area that cant be evacuated in time. A nuclear accident COULD generate much more fallout than Fukushima or Chernobyl. How can one understand the technology, and challenge the reality of such risks of nuclear power plants? Pretending that its been as bad as it might have been and as it could be - like a dangerous driver saying "its fine - I've only ever hit a tree!"

re: desalination - fine then, add the cost of desalinating salt water to replace the increasingly scarce resource that nuclear plants evaporate, to their already uncompetitive cost.

To add to your examples, there was the very real possibility with Fukushima that Tokyo would have had to be evacuated. This was seriously considered at the highest levels of the Japanese government (i.e. the PM and cabinet):

> The 400-page report, due to be released later this week, also describes a darkening mood at the prime minister’s residence as a series of hydrogen explosions rocked the plant on March 14 and 15. It says Mr. Kan and other officials began discussing a worst-case outcome if workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were evacuated. This would have allowed the plant to spiral out of control, releasing even larger amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere that would in turn force the evacuation of other nearby nuclear plants, causing further meltdowns.

> The report quotes the chief cabinet secretary at the time, Yukio Edano, as having warned that such a “demonic chain reaction” of plant meltdowns could result in the evacuation of Tokyo, 150 miles to the south.

> “We would lose Fukushima Daini, then we would lose Tokai,” Mr. Edano is quoted as saying, naming two other nuclear plants. “If that happened, it was only logical to conclude that we would also lose Tokyo itself.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/world/asia/japan-consider...

> Because its so simple as saying, "the wind COULD have blown the fukushima fallout southwards over Tokyo instead of relatively promptly into the Pacific." A nuclear accident COULD deliver fallout to a highly populated area that cant be evacuated in time.

So the thing that actually happened with Chernobyl then, not something significantly worse than that.

> re: desalination - fine then, add the cost of desalinating salt water to replace the increasingly scarce resource that nuclear plants evaporate, to their already uncompetitive cost.

Evaporating the water is how you desalinate it. It starts as seawater, it evaporates, you recondense it as fresh water. The equipment needed to do that costs less than the value of the water; the major expense is generating the heat which you're already doing for power generation. So I guess we could subtract the net profits from producing that valuable side product from the cost of the power generation, sure.

Do we then get to add the costs of climate change to the cost of burning coal, or are we only attempting accurate accounting for nuclear and not anything else?

Actually - most desalination is done by reverse osmosis - which is much more efficient than evaporation.

> Water resource is consumed, sure it rains again...

And sometimes ocean water is rained back on land. Hurray, water cycle!

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