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Comment by BrockSamson | Hacker News Reader

Coal power stations produce around 5-10 tonnes of radioactive waste every year. This seems to be ignored for the most part when discussing nuclear energy.

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+1. Just to add an explanation, they do so by taking naturally occurring radioactive particles that would otherwise remain locked deep into the Earth, and putting them in the atmosphere.

This should be common knowledge, but almost no one knows it.

how does the rate of radioactivity added to the air compare to farming? Plants with deep roots also extract radioactivity from the ground and then we eat it.

this is a serious question, which of course ties into the concept of "banana equivalent dose", which helps to contextualize claims about radioactivity.

For one thing, plant life is merely repeatedly recycling the mineral content of an only slowly-varying topsoil, while coal-burning is adding new sources.

It is not useful to use the many failings of coal as a fuel to promote nuclear power. Nuclear power does not compete against coal, it competes against wind/solar and natural gas.

The constant refrain of 'but coal ..' from nuclear advocates is just an admission that nuclear power is un-economic and unable to compete in the marketplace against the best options.

Then why do i keep hearing that germany has been producing a lot more pollution since they stopped nuclear power because of coal and gaz being used as a subsitute source of energy ?

No idea why you keep hearing that: Failure to meet your reduction goals does not equate an increase in pollution.

https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...

Because people are misrepresenting facts (aka. lying)

Germany did not stop using nuclear power, it started phasing it out (which had actually been planned long before Fukushima), and has not been producing more pollution because it has in fact been replacing coal and gas as well as nuclear with renewable sources: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

Germany has actually slightly increased its gas usage - though compared to other energy sources, its currently more of a rounding error in magnitude:

                    2002    2018

    Total            503     545

    Coal+Oil         253     205
    Nuclear          156      72

    Gas               40      44
    Biomass            4      45

    Wind+Solar+Hydro  39     177

    Other             10       3

https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&p...

More significantly, the increase in gas is more than offset by a decrease in coal and oil.

Right. Quantitatively:

Coal declined by 48 TWh

Gas increased by 4 TWh.

Nuclear declined by 84 TWh.

Renewables picked up the slack by adding 130 TWh of generation.

Natural gas plants are frequently peak load plants: They’re expensive, but they’re cheaper than a brownout or blackout.

Wind is intermittent. Solar is too (with the exception of solar thermal). Nuclear is, was, and always will be about base load the same as coal.

Nuclear power does not compete against wind and solar, as wind and solar are intermittent power sources. Nuclear is a firm energy source, in that we can use it to create steady-state power during periods that intermittent sources are not available. Coal is also a firm energy source, so coal and nuclear definitely compete.

For more, "There is No One Energy Solution", https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/there-is-no-on...

Once you combine them with storage and peakers, intermittent renewable sources do compete with other base load providers. It's still a work in progress, though.

This mis-states how electrical generation markets work and relies on the fallacy of "baseload", which is an artifact created by the past-grid domination of large thermal plants for generation.

In my market (Texas/ERCOT) there is no separate market for "firm" power. You either run or you don't on an every-15-minutes basis. You are either a price "taker", or a price "maker". In this market the NPPs are always, always, price "takers". They absolutely compete with the price makers, which are always either wind, solar, or most commonly, natural gas.

Coal is always a price "taker" in this market as well.

Whether a generator is a "taker" or "maker" in terms of pricing is a function of the economic impact to it of not running in a given bid segment, and its ability to compete in the bidding for the "last MW" of the bid-price stack.

Large thermal plants like NPPs rely very much on the economics of being able to get premium pricing for every single minute of the day and night. In a competetive market they can't do that, because gas/wind/solar can under-price them by very large margins. So the NPPs become un-economic to run (if already running), and very much un-fundable to build as new capacity. The same market force applies to coal.

Your rationale does not address the core argument of the piece, which is that as reliance on intermittent energy sources approaches 100%, their cost will rise steeply.

It's not necessary to do a piece by piece rebuttal of a professional "skeptic", who is a neuroscientist, and whose reasoning relies on someone who worked at Shellenberger's "breakthrough institute", which existed solely to provide pseudo-scientific buttressing for the message that renewable energy is bad, and the climate change, if it's happening, isn't really that bad.

You are essentially using Shellenberger-provided articles as proof that Shellenberger isn't a con artist. It's all bunk. Top to bottom, same game plan.

I refer to them because their arguments make sense to me - they seem measured and nuanced. I've encountered a lot of pseudo-science, and this has none of the hallmarks that I associate with it. The argument is not that renewables are bad, but they alone are not enough. Can you point to something that provides a counter-argument?

Unfortunately, in practice nuclear does still compete against coal. It would be wonderful if the choice was between nuclear and renewables, but that is not yet where we are.

Nuclear is still the lesser of the two evils compared to coal and oil, which are very much the only other option in many cases.

Coal is so bad that we'd have to have one Chernobyl nearly every week all the time to catch up with death rates.

Coal deaths per energy: ~ 100k / PWh

Coal consumption per year: > 40 PWh

Coal deaths per year: >4M

Chernobyl death estimates: 4k to 93k

Which gives 4M / 93k = 43 Chernobyls per year to catch up with coal (best case estimates).

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