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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

Haven't nuclear waste recycling and safety features gotten really good in the past few decades? I feel like not many people know just how little waste is created with modern recycling and just how safe nuclear is with modern safety features.

Seems like we need a positive PR campaign to help convince folks that nuclear is way better than fossil fuels. This could easily be bipartisan.

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There's really two kinds of waste: spent fuel (which can be effectively recycled, leaving only a tiny bit of extremely dangerous lanthanides, actinides, and plutonium), and "lower level" waste. The latter includes pretty much every other part of the reactor building after it's decomissioned.

> positive PR campaign

The nuclear industry has been at this for decades; at this stage, the PR is part of the problem.

My view on this is that it's probably too late to start building new nuclear plants, the cost overrun problems are severe, and there are plenty of countries that they should not be built in. But that doesn't mean we should close the existing ones early. If they can be refurbished economically without compromising safety, we should do that.

Switching from nuclear to natural gas indicates that gas is too cheap, and should be subject to carbon pricing and curtailment of new drilling and fracking.

We can build plants with SMRs. These should fix most of the issues of larger plants except maybe decomissioning. It should be easier to decomission 12 x 60 MW modules instead of a single 720 MW utility scale reactor. At least you can transport the smaller modules without dissasembly.

Nuclear power plants got big because operating costs do not scale linearly with reactor size. SMR advocates have not explained why their concepts will not be killed by increased operating cost per kWh.

> Haven't nuclear waste recycling and safety features gotten really good in the past few decades?

I thought you were being snarky at first, but the rest of the comment appears to indicate you're being serious. In Belgium we've been stuck in endless discussions regarding what to do with our nuclear waste. We used to dump it in the sea, which was probably a bad idea. Now it's stored in barrels which are apparently leaking some kind of radioactive goo[1].

So either this waste recycling isn't as good everywhere, or we have a different definition of the word "good".

[1] https://fanc.fgov.be/nl/informatiedossiers/radioactief-afval... (Dutch)

The grandparent comment mentioned modern recycling. Perhaps Belgium is operating old types of reactors that aren't amenable to modern ways of dealing with waste? A quick search yielded that all of Belgium's reactors were built in the 70's and 80's.

But then if we need to replace all the old reactors by new ones, the argument that renewables are just ramping up is moot.

If that argument could convince investors, it would have already.

We don't need to replace old reactors by new ones. Replacing the reactors with new ones is an option, but only an option, and almost certainly not the economically optimal one.

That's a good point. These reactors are ancient. I wasn't aware of any major improvements in spent fuel handling, so I've got some reading to do!

A lot of news pieces about nuclear are unrealistically rosy. Waste reprocessing isn't really all that new and it doesn't really get rid of waste. It replaces much of the solid waste with even more liquid waste.

The problem with having any discussion of nuclear is agreeing upon the facts. It's crazy hard to find an unbiased source. If you asked a random bystander why we haven't built nuclear reactors in recent years, you might hear "environmentalists." However, the truth is dramatically different. No one will insure a nuclear power plant except the US government. Investors won't invest in nuclear, as there's no appetite for the risks to open a plant and spend over a decade building it when cost overruns are common and it may never actually open.

The reason wind and solar are growing much, much faster than nuclear today isn't because of "environmentalists." It's because nuclear involves far more subsidies and risk.

Aren't the "environmentalists" the ones that are creating the mood that makes it hard to invest in nuclear?

Probably but Fukushima probably helped too.

Mood has nothing to do with investing in nuclear. We are talking something you build that prints money at a guaranteed rate, there's no one to sell to that you need to influence one way or another to make them throw more of their money at you.

The only reason why nuclear power isn't widespread is that shareholders see a 30 year return on investment and run away to juicier returns.

Investors at large aren't phased by things like the environment. There's too many who would invest either way if the profit potential was clear. So far, all nuclear plants have required large subsides, taken over a decade to build and open, and have cost far more than originally anticipated. Investors often look to past performance as a predictor of likely returns. There's no appetite for this kind of investment nowadays.

Exactly. Solar is winning because of economics. Nuclear is losing because of economics.

And yet, for the same quantity of energy over the same timeframe, nuclear is cheaper. It's not so much that it loses because of economics, it's losing because of the perceived uncertainty of the economics.

Risk, not uncertainty. The long-term (or even medium-term) pricing situation for renewables is highly volatile right now. It makes investing in new nuclear extremely risky financially. What if you start building a plant now, expecting a certain energy price to pay for it over decades, and by the time you finish, solar power costs half as much as your target? That could well happen. That's how utility companies go bankrupt.

So, yeah, uncertainty about the prices creates a risk that has to be bet on

Does that factor in the upfront cost of building the reactor? IIRC it takes 30 years to get a return on investment for reactors, which is a non issue if the reactors are public but definitely a tough pill for the private sector to swallow.

New nuclear is certainly not cheaper. And we will soon be at the point where operating existing nuclear is not cheaper.

Part of the problem is the difficulty in building new reactors, which means old and outdated reactor designs remain in operation which cannot utilize or recycle nuclear material because our nuclear knowledge at the time was lacking. If your reactor was built in the 70s or 80s, it was probably designed in the 60s which means 60s era nuclear technology, only 20 years after we first discovered nuclear power in the first place.

Its like driving around Model-Ts and then lamenting about how inefficient and unsafe they are. And then using that as evidence on why we shouldn't build modern cars.

But, PV has gone through many generations of technology over the years. That's why its cost has gone down by a factor of 300 or so.

If nuclear hasn't iterated as much, that's the fault of nuclear, not the cruel oppressing world. It's a technology that's big and slow to evolve, and that's ultimately lethal.

I believe the issue with recycling is non-proliferation from one or both of these reasons: 1) If I'm not mistaken, recycling generates/accumulates plutonium, which in the wrong hands can be made into a thermonuclear weapon. 2) Enriching the spent waste back into fuel is much too close to the process of enriching it for bombs. I distinctly remember a YT video where they said that it's very hard (as in, much work) to enrich U to x-% for reactor fuel, but once you're at x-%, it's realtively easy to keep going to to y-% for bombs. So to recycle waste involves running that process and the NRC or some governments simply don't allow anyone to do it. My apologies if I'm incorrect in any of this.

No, quite the contrary.

Just as an example, in Germany the search for the ultimate disposal place has just started over from scratch after decades of failed attempts.

In the US, a nuclear waste dome is leaking in to the Pacific: https://www.civilbeat.org/beat/a-dome-holding-nuclear-waste-...

Here's another story from 12 days ago: "Years of mismanagement, delays at nuclear waste sites could pose risk, report says" https://www.wsbtv.com/news/2-investigates/years-of-mismanage...

Excerpt: "According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, cost estimates to clean up the legacy radioactive tank waste and contamination at the facilities increased $214 billion from 2011 through 2018. During that same period, DOE spent $45 billion on cleanup efforts. DOE spent $170 billion on cleanup since 1989, but the most challenging work remains. Estimates now stand at $377 billion to clean up the waste, but that amount does not include cost to clean sites where no feasible remedy exists."

Would this waste have been moved to Sequoia Mountain had Obama not torpedoed it to get support from Harry Reid?

Yucca Mountain.

Realize this thing is a sideshow. Having it open would not have helped the market acceptance of nuclear power. Even if waste disposal costs are totally ignored (as the Lazard levelized cost numbers do) new reactors are totally out of the running economically.

> In the US, a nuclear waste dome is leaking in to the Pacific

That has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power. This is the type of fear mongering that caused the current situation.

Long term, large scale containment of radioactive waste is an unsolved problem. Nuclear advocates have two answers to this problem:

A) We'll solve it later (we should research fuel reprocessing, we have an urgency to act, etc.)

B) It's not really a problem (people don't actually die from radioactive waste, most nuclear plants have proven themselves safely managed, etc.)

Both answer sound like sweeping the dust under the rug. What happens when (not if) a catastrophe occurs? If a war breaks out, how can you guarantee the safety of all nuclear power plants around the world? If a country economy collapses, how will nuclear engineers get paid? If an epidemic of a deadly disease spreads worldwide, how many people can die before there is not enough people to safely operate a nuclear plant?

We cannot sweep this under the rug. Nuclear energy may be theorically cheap to implement, but the potential cost of an uncontrollable failure is too great.

What if technicolor monkeys start flying out of my arse ? Whataboutism aside, today, right now, thousands of coal fired power plants are polluting the air I breathe with more radioactive waste, particulates and CO2, to a degree not seen in the last 800k years. Your catastrophe is real and happening right now, in real time, today, this minute.

A modern thorium/uranium recycling pipeline should only produce small amounts of "final" waste (and only after waste has been iteratively recycled many times). That final waste takes a few hundred years to decay, but if contained, it is harmless to the environment. So, create a warehouse large enough to handle 200 years worth of waste, and create a pipeline. At the end of the pipeline, the containers are empty and can be used at the start again. Who knows, we may even be able to figure out a way to extract even more energy from the "final" waste eventually.

Consider that the final nuclear waste passively disappears after a few hundred years, whereas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not passively disappear in a few hundred years - it must be actively removed by plants, but the plants can't keep up with humans.

"create a warehouse large enough to handle 200 years worth of waste"

200 years ago the world was a very different place. I'm struggling to think of any building not including houses still used for their original purpose, from that long ago.

So while I don't doubt that we could build a structure that lasts 200 years, I doubt we could build some kind of continuously used industrial building without it becoming some kind of ship of Theseus. Now that in itself isn't necessarily a problem, except what about a war or something. Unlikely? Yes, but how many countries havent had any war on their soil in the past 200 years?

And I cant imagine a 2219 health and safety person green lighting the reuse of a 200 year old containment vessel for storing nuclear waste either.

An example of a building:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Peter%27s_Basilica

Yes, and I suppose many churches in general.

In the UK theres still some covered market square buildings that still hold markets also.

http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/whitby-blog/whitby-marketp...

Westminster Hall has been single purpose for a while. Since the late 11th century.

Perhaps that's the answer. If waste is stored in a warehouse next to the seat of government, I doubt there will be short-cuts, neglect and cost savings to the same degree as say putting it on the Cumbrian coast.

https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/building/pal...

You know Westminster palace is in dire need of repair and debating in the house of commons had to stop due to water flooding in through the roof recently?

So yes there probably would be 'cost savings'

Fair point. :)

Though I thought it was just the palace, ie the Victorian bit put up after the fire (I'm not helping my case here, am I?), that was falling apart.

Although Westminster Hall is on the estate and is part of the palace in terms of tours and so on, it isn't the part they want to refurbish.

It's too vast to be useful for much, but it does illustrate that the columns and so on in most buildings you do use are not actually obligatory (it doesn't have any). It's a bit like those huge buildings for building space rockets and jet liners, except built hundreds of years before the people who invented those were even born.

> That has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power.

Why not?

Because the site in question is the crater left by a nuclear bomb test in the 50s. There was never a power plant nearby, and the type of site, and the type of waste, is very different from what a power plant would produce.

The post i was answering to was talking about nuclear waste in general. So was my response.

Typical lie.

In fact nuclear waste management from civilian power has fantastic.

In fact all nuclear power stations include cleanup and waste management as part of the cost.

Germany problem is not technical but political and anybody that has ever looked into nuclear power in Germany knows this. Not to mention that finding a 'ultimate disposal' a pretty unnecessary and wrongheaded that is only being perused because limited understanding of nuclear power in the first place.

Really? I'm envious about your government's competency in the matter, in that case!

I'm fairly pro-nuclear, at least as part of a broadly renewable energy portfolio, as I think industry and transportation will need at least something more than solar and wind to reach none-emission energy production saturation any time soon.

However, if my own Government's record is anything to go by here in the UK, waste management is a perenially-deferred problem and clean up was not part of the original billing of any existing Nuclear facilities. It's all stored on site pending long-term secure solutions or - if optimisim is t obe believed - until we can develop technologies to eke every last joule of energy from the ever-growing mountain of waste.

We need to differentiate between a number of different problems.

One is cleanup of nuclear sites, in that are there is a separation between civilian nuclear reactors and the much, much more problematic site management for nuclear waste from nuclear weapons production. Most problems from civilian sites date back to the early days of nuclear and most states have put in place some live cycle protocols for these sites.

Old nuclear weapons production sites are a whole lot of a bigger issues and its a desperate topic. Its not fair to accuse nuclear power of being problematic based on issues from those sites.

In general, I would argue most of these problems date back to the early days of nuclear technology and should not be used as a argument against new nuclear power.

In terms of waste management from civilian waste there is a very good argument to be made that putting all that waste into a long term storage (1000s of years) is not a smart thing to do. The nuclear waste is so small in overall size and relatively easy to story that it is not really a pressing issue for the next couple decades or even small number of centuries.

The technologies to use the energy from nuclear waste will not happen unless nuclear energy get used and finds larger commercial adoption. If you believe in 200 years nuclear will not exist and solar and wind will be used, then these technology will never exists. However if you assume that humanity has any kind of nuclear future, these technologies will very likely exists and that nuclear waste will be considered a resource.

Technically its pretty clear that we can build such long term facilities for the eventual small amount nuclear waste without much technical difficulty. What bother me is the push to demand that this problem is handled, before any other nuclear innovation can take place. It is used as an argument against nuclear even if the problem is not pressing in the least and compared to the continued exists of coal and utterly disingenuous way to attempted prevent usage of nuclear technology.

Finnland has build a repository called, Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository, and has shown that this is not really that crazy of a thing. Again, for me this is a problem that should be pretty far down on the list of priorites to solve for the world. The reason it doesn't exists in most countries is political, not technical. See the Yucca Maintain political shitshow while at the same time much better sites exists in the US but those can't be considered because of political deadlock.

Did you read your link? Honest question.

Here is a quote:

    A concrete dome containing radioactive waste on the
    Marshall Islands is cracking open, The Washington 
    Post reported Monday.

    The U.S. conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall
    Islands in the 1940s and 1950. The dome was built decades     later to cover remaining fallout debris

To put it in perspective, that's like closing solar power plant, because a star went supernova in another galaxy.

In fairness, no one needs to be convinced that nuclear plants are better than coal plants. The problem is the renewables.

In Iowa, they are in the process of shuttering their nuclear plants. Now no one in Iowa was out protesting the plants or anything, but here's the issue. Windmills have reached a level of practicality and low cost that encouraged Iowans to slap them up almost everywhere. (Seriously, drive through Iowa sometime and you'll see what I mean.) Even relatively small investors can get together, slap up some windmills, and start making some money.

Now imagine you're in Iowa and deciding on which electric bill you want to pay. Do you want to pay the 2 to 3 cents per kWh for wind? Or do you want to pay the 5x cost for coal or nuclear? Not surprisingly, Iowans, who are more poor than most of you on the coasts, have switched to wind in a big way.

It's a money problem. If we want nuclear, we have to convince the government to subsidize it. You're not going to find a lot of people out there who will just agree to sign up and pay 5 to 10 times the electricity bill just for the pleasure of saying they're using carbon free nuclear.

It's like organic food. Sure, maybe it is better for them.

But a lot of the masses only see the price tag.

People do need to be convinced that nuclear is better than natural gas. In calm winter nights, nuclear is competing with natural gas, not wind. And because of fracking and horizontal drilling, the electricity prices have fallen in deregulated markets like the midwest, and electricity revenues have dropped precipitously. When you have a plant that's all capital and O&M with very low fuel cost (like a nuke), this unexpected drop in electricity price is hard to swallow and you shut down.

Having natural gas prices go back up because it emits greenhouse gas would have a lot better optics than subsidizing nuclear plants. But you're right that Iowans don't care about that. Shoot, even in Seattle we couldn't get a carbon tax passed.

The nuclear industry needs to get serious about reducing its costs. It's not very efficient. They've got a few hundred people at each plant doing regulatory compliance paperwork with some really inefficient and expensive process.

At least the nuclear industry is trying, a little: https://www.nei.org/resources/delivering-the-nuclear-promise

And considering the usual ways giant industries choose to "reduce costs", it's a bit unnerving for the rest of us.

Blaming the costs on regulatory compliance bureaucracy is one of those things that pro-nuclear people really need to stop saying, even to the extent that it's true (which is less than they think). Distrust of big corporations is as high as distrust of government, and for good reason. No one wants to live downwind from a nuclear plant constructed by the lowest bidder. Blaming the cost and construction issues on those stupid anti-science treehuggers and their liberal regulations is just alienating the very people you need to win over.

That said, nuclear will never, ever be able to achieve either the real or the apparent risk levels of a wind farm or a bunch of rooftop solar panels. And there's probably not a less attractive look for nuclear enthusiasts than some dude mansplaining about how solar is more dangerous than nuclear based on the number of people who smash their thumbs with a hammer while installing panels.

> That said, nuclear will never, ever be able to achieve either the real or the apparent risk levels of a wind farm or a bunch of rooftop solar panels.

I'm going to go ahead and point out that more people die falling off their roofs installing solar per kWh than have died per kWh from decades of nuclear operation [1]. Denigrating that data as mansplaining seems pretty anti-scientific. Both death/kWh rates are nearly zero compared to fossil fuels.

Apparent risks, now that's a real problem. Can be solved with PR and education.

Check my link in the previous post. You'll see that the industry is writing down in good detail exactly how it plans to reduce costs by increasing procedural efficiency without reducing safety.

To just say that appropriate safety has to be expensive, and any attempt to fix it is unsafe, is pretty bold, especially in the face of what the climate scientists are predicting with continued carbon emissions.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

The "falling off the roofs" argument is bogus in at least two ways.

First, most PV installs in the US are now large scale, where the PV modules are installed on the ground, not on roofs.

Second, deaths of workers in an industry are different than deaths of the general public. Workers made a choice to work on roofs; the public has no choice if a reactor near them has a problem.

So if a technology kills workers but not the public, that's ok, because the workers made that choice? I don't think that stands to much scrutiny. Most workers choose careers of opportunity.

Besides, the direct short-term deaths from commercial nuclear nearly all came from Chernobyl first responders, where staff and firefighters were the ones who got ARS (they chose hazardous careers too).

For the "up to 4000" latent deaths from Chernobyl, I think you have a good point. 1960s nuclear is worse than wind and solar in latent deaths. I'm hoping advanced nuclear with passive decay heat removal and low pressure coolants will even that out.

I also didn't mention the reasons behind deaths from wind, which include hazardous maintenance and ice throw. Deaths from these things are exceedingly low per kWh, just like they are for nuclear. That's the point I'm trying to convey: nuclear is roughly on par with wind/solar in terms of deaths/kWh.

Anyway, where is the best data on what kind of solar is currently being built?

I'm not saying it's ok, I'm saying its different. And it IS clearly different, in regulation. Risks to the uninvolved public are subject to stricter control than to workers, in the energy industry and elsewhere.

One could make the case that the public is also subject to risk from solar, for example from traffic accidents transporting the materials to and from large scale installation sites. But the "falls from roof tops" argument isn't doing that.

It's definitely different. I agree. I should adjust the falls from rooftops talk. I don't want to malign the variable renewables. I need to figure out how to explain to people that nuclear deaths/kWh are extremely low compared to our current mix, and yes they're even roughly as low or lower than the excellent characteristics of the wind/solar lifecycle.

People often meet this idea wish shock: "But how can wind or solar hurt anyone? There are no Captain Planet episodes about that." So I have to explain some mechanisms of why huge distributed energy harvesting can harm people. If you have other suggestions on how to communicate this effectively I'd love the help.

I've seen the same thing in north Texas and Kansas but wind isn't everywhere in such large quantities (with tons of farm land to easily build on to boot).

Exactly; in places where wind works really, really well, you might as well take advantage of it. If you really can get your power from wind, why bother with nuclear? (But what about when the wind dies down?)

But there's many places where wind power just isn't feasible.

> no one needs to be convinced that nuclear plants are better than coal plants

Germany decided to shut their nukes before their coal plants

In a panic over a Tsunami - note that Germany doesn't have a coast to speak off and is not prone to tsunamis.

It was also used to keep the Greens on side though you do have to ask who benefits and is keeping coal plant open longer really a green solution.

The nuclear exit was planned long before Fukushima, all Fukishima did was create public pressure to not go through with the prolonging of the nuclear exit that was originally planned. There are 7 reactors operational still, although most are in the process of deconstruction.

German here - it is not because of panic over a tsunami, but about the complete incompetence shown in the Fukushima disaster. The plant had construction faults, the operations after the disaster failed to prevent a preventeable disaster. Yes, we won't have a tsunami at any our nuclear power plants. But whatever else has been overlooked during their construction, where are the operating companies maybe cutting too many corners to save costs?

I assume you've stopped flying on airplanes decades ago.

No, and I have no reason to assume, that large regions become contaminated if the airplane crashed.

>Windmills have reached a level of practicality and low cost that encouraged Iowans to slap them up almost everywhere.

Why are you sure this is the reason? If the price tag is the main concern, the North Dakota oil boom and ongoing pipeline projects are probably the primary cause.

What are you saying here? Why would additional supplies of energy cause the price to rise?

They seem to be saying that Iowa is closing their one nuclear plant because wind farms are cheaper. People primarily care about price, and don't want their government providing massive subsidies.

If price is what's causing them to turn away from nuclear, then they probably turned to cheaper oil. And they seem fine providing massive subsidies to further things like the Dakota Access pipeline.

I agree there is an implicit subsidy for pipelines, in the sense that if the pipeline operators screw up and poison everyone who lives nearby, society will probably do something to clean that up. That's similar to any useful but dangerous facility that we allow to be built and operated. (Like, for instance, a nuclear power plant...) Pipelines are still superior to other petroleum transport modes such as trains, in terms of both cost and safety. Most taxpayers can think of other projects that deserve the epithet "massive subsidy" more than a pipeline funded entirely by its owners.

I don't see the connection to wind generation, however. Did some Iowa landowner finance a wind farm with a DAPL eminent-domain payment? That seems tenuous.

Greenpeace has successfully spent several decades painting nuclear power as Evil so its going to be difficult to convince voters to support it from now on.

Hoisting my previous comment on Greenpeace from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17774347

The backlash against nuclear comes from four points and a meta-point:

1) Weapons proliferation. The standard fission cycle is just too convenient for this (after all, that's why it was developed) and so an international infrastructure needs to be developed around restricting this. See Iran for example. This also prompted a lot of opposition from people who didn't want to live under the threat of their cities being nuked.

This also turned into lethal fights with the environmental movement (the French government sank Greenpeace's ship Rainbow Warrior with a terrorist bombing that killed a photographer, over the question of nuclear weapons testing). A difficult bit of bad blood to bury.

2) Huge scale and persistence of accidents. Chernobyl affected agriculture in the whole of Western Europe, and took decades for an adequate final containment to be built. Bhopal was bad - and possibly worse in effects! - but at least the area isn't a permanent wasteland.

Pebble bed reactors were deemed the promising future, until one of them jammed. It's now unfixable and practically impossible to decomission: (wikipedia) "There exists currently no dismantling method for the AVR vessel, but it is planned to develop some procedure during the next 60 years and to start with vessel dismantling at the end of the century."

3) Waste disposal. A forever problem. I'm old enough to remember Greenpeace fighting it being dumped at sea, but the problem of where we put it remains.

4) Cost overruns. A systematic problem in the industry. Doesn't affect renewables to anything like the same extent.

5) The meta-point: systematic lying about the effects of all of the above. That this happens to overlap with the era of discovering that all sorts of previous advances (CFCs, tetraethyl lead, DDT, asbestos) had nasty side-effects which were also lied about or minimised is not a coincidence. Nuclear advocates take the arrogant position that they don't need to win trust.

All reasonable points, but would you not agree that in the here and now, our first priority should be replacing that coal power station with renewables, and then the gas, then the nuclear?

That seems reasonable - no point in closing functioning, safe, carbon free plant that's already been paid for.

The UK has already almost entirely replaced coal.

"The UK has already almost entirely replaced coal"

Indeed. I'd rather take a global approach to what is a global problem though. Germany and Eastern Europe are still burning plenty of coal that could be offset. We are all on the same grid I believe.

That's also a bit impossible. There aren't any easy solutions going forward.

You want to replace most power station with non-base load renewables (wind + solar). Well, at peak power are going to add more batteries, to make sure your energy doesn't go to waste. Want to add more batteries, oh you'll need more renewable sources keep it net positive during the winter months and probably keep those battery from draining completely. This is ofc, before the quetion arises, what happens if you have weeks/months of no sun at all :)

Geothermal? Not everyone has access plus possible increases in tectonic activity.

Hydro? Not everyone has access plus possible destruction of ecosystems.

Burning waste to produce power? Probably not enough burnable waste.

Don't get me wrong. Solar scales great if you have a backup to fallback to. California going from 1.9-2.5% of solar would cost as much as a small nuclear plant (around $18 billion dollars).

Impossible? Its prioritising.

Theres a significant number of Greens that are against nuclear. And rather than infight about that, I'd rather work on what we all do agree on first.

Once we've decarbonised the grid then we can have the discussion about nuclear.

What I don't want is any other countries doing a Germany and pissing away time and money turning off nuclear reactors whilst still burning coal.

Related to (2) and (5), nuclear advocates also tend to assume that the designs being safe if in the hands of a competent, well-supplied, conscientious organization is enough. I used to think the same, but seeing how nuclear plants are neglected even in Western European countries, I no longer think that assumption can be maintained.

Ok, let's analyze it.

1) Ok, this can be a problem. 2) Citation needed. It has lowest number of deaths per kWh. By your logic, planes fall out of the sky, and many people die, so we should never use planes and rely on more deadly methods.

As for pebble bed reactors, mistakes are normal when doing something novel. See the problems LHC faced. Luckily LHC had better funding than nuclear.

3) It's a thousand year problem. The rare metals in average phone are a more of a forever problem. They will never decay to a less toxic compound.

4) Yeah, this is true.

5) Not sure about this one, I see lots of FUD on all sides.

To clarify, I'm not claiming nuclear power is an angel that will save us. But it's a devil we'll probably have to live with if we are to go 0 carbon in near future. Going 100% renewables requires a revolution in battery tech, and a revolution in how electric grid distributes electricity.

Thanks for pointing that out. Greenpeace is the perfect example of how "fighting for the environment" is meaningless. Are we talking about biodiversity, air pollution, water pollution, side effects of mining... or climate change? Unfortunately, it's hard to find something that works for all of these problems. Except reducing consumption overall.

No. Unfortunatly research and devlopment into all things nuclear has been systematically eradicated. Regulation that were put in place have essentially eliminated all progress specially progress that isn't incredibly incremental.

The problem is that it is essentially impossible to bring these new technologies to market as a private companies. And government have shown zero interest in doing anything by themselves or even having a regulatory system that is in any way sensible.

Current plants in the west are pretty safe in general but recycling is non-existent. Only France does any kind of nuclear waste reprocessing at all (outside of research).

Sadly the anti nuclear wave went incredibly deep and has since basically destroyed the industry and a whole field of engineering.

The only positive thing is that both with democrats and republicans a new pro nuclear consensus is emerging. The US regulatory agency are slowly waking up to the fact that they have utterly destroyed the nuclear industry and are taking small steps in the right direction. Thanks to these changes a few important changes have gone threw congress and are getting implemented by the Department on Energy. Sadly these things are way to slow.

Reprocessing made sense in an environment in which nuclear was winning and uranium was becoming scarce. In that environment, it could make sense to reprocess to extend fuel reserves.

But we do not live in that world. Uranium supplies are plentiful. It's cheap and simple to just store spent fuel in dry casks and put off worrying about if it will ever be reprocessed. Reprocessing is a net economic loss, in France and elsewhere.

also modern airplanes with modern software never crash.

I know its only a metaphor but arguably modern planes crash much less. No crashes in the US in the last decade.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/02/13/colgan-air-crash-10-year...

Modern planes really do crash less than older ones. Just stay away from 737MAX models.

So, nuclear reactors are very safe except of dangerous-tech-xA45b which we only know is deadly after one or two incidents?

Actually, yes.

1) Don't use crappy Soviet reactors like Chernobyl; this should be a no-brainer.

2) Don't locate a nuclear power plant in a place where it can be flooded easily.

Other than the crappy Chernobyl reactor, I don't know of any inherently dangerous reactor designs, especially in Western nations.

AFAIK most modern designs are fail-safe, e.g. with passive features like control rods suspended with electromagnets over the reactor - if activated (or if power fails) they simply fall in and kill the reaction.

It's arguable that the 737Max is the exception that proves the rule.

I still have no idea how the FAA approved the "software fix".

To me the bug is the corruption that allowed it to be deployed in the first place and the lack of punishment.

People also overestimate the amount of waste. Very little waste is produced. Also, the only safety feature needed to store nuclear waste is water.

Keeping the contaminated water out of the groundwater is the big problem.

No, it's not. I never said anything about the ground, contain the water & waste in a tank.

Not to mention the water is optional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Vitrificatio...

People also overestimate how much waste disposal has contributed to the current economic failure of nuclear power.

What do they do with the little waste?

In many cases, store it in concrete casks on site.

Google the fuel pellets used and understand that the waste from refueling is actually quite small.

It could definitely be bipartisan. I am a conservative and 100% support nuclear as an alternative to dirty coal. Unfortunately, many “environmentalists” seem to be stuck in the 1970s when it comes to knowledge about modern nuclear.

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