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Comment by citilife | Hacker News Reader

It should be:

"Why <insert power generation> Will Never Be Inherently Safe"

All power generating has some risk. The idea is to create a differential and capture the differential. Inherently, generating power means capturing energy differentials and typically the higher the TWh the more damage when a failure to contain said energy creation occurs (think a nuclear plant, dam, wind turbine, etc.)

Safety in nuclear power, as with other forms of energy generation, have more to do with politics. Politics will lead to cutting or increasing costs and safety guards being put (or not put) in place. Arguably, pollution due to coal and natural gas is going to cause global warming and in turn many billions will possibly die from starvation.

Is that "inherently safe?"

I don't think anyone disagrees that it will never be "inherently" safe, but it may be "safer" or "cause less damage" long term to the general populous than alternatives today.

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Nuclear: Potential Wastelands, storage of waste

Solar: Bird Deaths, toxic to make PV panels

Wind: Potential Bird Deaths, fails violently when it does

Hydro: Dam Failure, incompatible with a healthy fishery

Fossil: Pollution of various forms, finite amount of fuel

I'd still prefer nuclear power, given the options.

Your list is totally disingenuous. Are you actually comparing the environmental issues associated with creating a solar panel, to a nuclear facility melting down and making the entire surrounding area uninhabitable and unusable for centuries? Not to mention causing a huge uptick in cancer in the the surrounding areas as well?

I think nuclear is our only real option moving forward (due to wildly increasing energy consumption) but we need to look at these things honestly. Any damage caused by solar or hydro is wildly incomparable to more nuclear meltdowns or current fossil fuel emissions.

We have enough land in most part of the world that if we lost, say, 10,000 - 100,000 acres a decade due to meltdown, we'd still be pretty okay (and I dont think we'd loose that much, given Generation II reactors that are in service, have a failure record which is something like 1 every 100 hour-years of actual operation) - that said the risk of nuclear meltdown is actually really really really low - even risks of moderate leaks are really low. The larger issue is long term storage of the wastes of the plants, which adds a huge cost to the energy generated.

I'd also consider hat with generation II reactors most of the failures were systems failures, not failures of the reactor itself - we know how to engineer around systems failures.

> We have enough land in most part of the world that if we lost, say, 10,000 - 100,000 acres a decade due to meltdown, we'd still be pretty okay

This is completely untenable. Perhaps you're okay with it if it occurs far from where you live, thus not affecting you, but it sure does affect other people. And the surrounding areas. It's not comparable at all with the other forms of energy production in that list aside from fossil fuels which are an even worse danger.

> we know how to engineer around systems failures.

We don't really know how to fix human-related errors, such as hubris, pride, laziness, shame, and so on. So many things are completely obvious in hindsight, but we continue to make similar mistakes now.

If we are only allocating 10,000 acres a decade for land lost to power generation then solar is a non-starter. Solar Star is a 579-megawatt (MWAC) photovoltaic power station spread over 3,200 acres. For comparison Fukushima Daini was delivering 4400MW.

On average, we have a serious meltdown event every 20 years with consequences far beyond anything that could happen from renewables.

I will eat a hat in front of everyone on HN at a pub if a utility scale solar plant backed by utility scale lithium battery storage ever melts down, requiring billions of dollars of remediation and making the surrounding land uninhabitable for centuries.

As you said, safety is politics, and politics are people. People will be greedy, they will cut corners, and without a rigid command structure and severe penalties for safety violations (ie the US Navy and their nuclear fleet), accidents will eventually occur. Solar is cheap to manufacture, easy to ship, and does not require skilled labor to rack and install (besides trained electricians for the interconnections).

As of a few minutes ago, California is generating 10GW of solar energy, 1.8GW of wind, and only 2.1GW of nuclear [1] [2].

[1] https://i.imgur.com/FHm1Ppw.png

[2] https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=...

The problem are many places solar is less effective, for instance the northern mostly cloud covered states.

Also, places such as Illinois have used primarily nuclear for power for decades without any incidents:

https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=IL#tabs-4

Lithium batteries are at best a bridge technology - meaning something good enough to get us until the next thing comes.

The issues with Lithium batteries is, a finite lifetime, a shortage of the materials needed to make them, toxic byproducts of manufacture and recycling or disposing of the the batteries when their finite life is used up.

Lithium batteries can be safely recycled (the DOE is funding a lithium recycling research program at ANL in Illinois [1] to further improve materials reclamation processes), and their cost will continue to come down rapidly as manufacturing for them scales up (hundreds of GWs of battery manufacturing are coming online over the next three years) for the millions of EVs that will be sold each year as internal combustion vehicles are outlawed [2]. Lithium is an abundant resource, is not constrained by geopolitics, and the use of cobalt (a conflict mineral) is being phased out as research permits.

If they're a bridge, they're still a better bridge than nuclear. Tesla had the Hornsdale Power Reserve installed (in Australia, from Nevada) in 90 days (100MW/129MWh installation). It takes 10 years to build nuclear generators. Maybe you reduce that time with streamlined reactor designs and regulatory processes, but you're never going to approach the speed of renewables and battery installs.

[1] https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/doe-argonne-lithium-i...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...

Australian residential customers are paying the highest electricity prices in the world [1]

Any solution works if you have unlimited amounts of other people's money to throw at the problem

[1] https://www.afr.com/news/australian-households-pay-highest-p...

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/australian-homes-are-... (Australian homes are turning to solar power in record numbers)

> A record amount of new solar capacity has been fitted to Australia’s households and businesses in the first three months of this year, an increase of 46% on the same period last year, according to the consultancy Green Energy Markets. And installations in Victoria have surged 90% after the state introduced an incentive scheme.

> It’s calculated that customers will save $600 million on their power bills over the next decade, thanks to the installations. And the scheme is bringing benefits in other areas, generating new jobs in the renewable energy sector.

Your link is paywalled, so I can't read the details, but rooftop solar is an incredibly good financial proposition in the Australian energy markets due to market dysfunctions. It seems like a useful scenario in which to subsidize clean energy instead of very dirty coal generation currently in service throughout most of Australia.

The link wasn't paywalled when I first visited it but when I try to go back now it is, must have hit a free limit I guess.

Incentive schemes are literally other people's money. The savings are reminiscent of a store putting the price up 50% prior to a 33% off super sale. Everything looks like a good deal when compared to inflated prices caused by market dysfunction.

When you burn fossil fuels that’s literally someone else’s air they need to survive (pollution from the burning of fossil fuels has a quantifiable impact on the health and mortality of humans). It’s not hard to see why we prioritize that over other people’s money and a more Libertarian outlook (“let the market work itself out”) when that has so clearly failed in an epic fashion.

A worst of both worlds result - very dirty coal generation currently in service throughout most of Australia - and the highest residential prices in the world.

Power reserves do not generate power, and they do not provide power in the orders that a nuclear power plant provides. If you can build something fast, it is not necessarily good. I think 10 years for a nuclear reactor is a bit of a stretch though. I think currently the initial infrastructure with a reactor or two is built in around 7 years, while adding additional reactors might take 3 or 4 years. And the building speed is quite fast in comparison I think. If you think it in terms of watt per year, a decent sized nuclear reactor gives 430MW/yr while building solar plant of that size that fast is quite an endeavor to take. Solar power does have the advantage that you can plug it in nearly instantly, but in the long run it cancels out.

Thanks, great info and references!

I appreciate the kind words. I am incredibly passionate about this topic!

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