Bags of debris from Fukushima disaster swept away in typhoon
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I really want to be a proponent of nuclear, but I don't see how any country can guarantee political stability for 100+ years. Here in South Africa, the state-owned Eskom power utility can't even keep our coal plants running for 12 months at a time. With re-election every 4 years and rampant corruption, it feels like we'll need a new set of laws to govern nuclear power that operates on longer time scales.
To be clear, I was not defending coal. But I do have to ask over what time period radioactive coal wastes "kills a lot more people than nuclear," because being alive is fatal. I think the variance matters even if the mean is lower.
That's neither here nor there, if it kills them in more accumulated ways, and with less or no chance of mass killing accidents.
Cars also hit millions, but we are ok with it, because of the cost/benefit, and the mode that it does so (isolated in different car accidents, etc).
If cars were able to kill 20,000 people in a single bad accident, then we'd have found something else instead...
Absolute death counts are not the be all end all... Spread over time, spread over incident, etc, are all things to also consider.
Even if the total death count is the same (or even if its less for the new design), the widespread small scale pattern is more acceptable than sudden mayhem.
For one, you could just not get in a car, and avoid recklessly crossing the street in the first case, and you'll be fine. In the other case, in the off chance of a new-car blowing up, it can destroy your whole 5-10 block periphery. I wouldn't accept that...
Yeah, but what's the coal plant equivalent? You can try to avoid living near nuclear plants as well.
And then the wind blows in this or that direction, after an accident, and your 1000 mile away "safe" place gets all kinds of radiation....
We also think about causes in quite different ways again precisely because everyone dies eventually. Shortening of life is ‘less bad’ than preventable death which is ‘less bad’ than deliberate killing.
For nuclear disasters you can then layer on an element of irrational fear of the unknown and lack of control which sets it apart - the horror of ‘this thing I don’t understand might kill us all in a few days and we can’t stop it’.
Doesn't sound irrational to fear more something that you don't know how it will spread and who/when will kill -- which could even vary by how the winds go on the day of the accident, etc.
Sounds like a legitimate reason to fear something more -- an unpredictable killer is more fearsome that a more predictable one, which you can at least try to come up with a plan to avoid more easily...
It's also an interesting contrast to what I've read about the attitude of the people who actually lived in Pripyat at the time who were arguably irrationally calm.
I.e. just because we use coal doesn’t mean society is okay with it.
To do a simple calculation, you need to know the real costs of things, and right now those are unbounded.
“Think tank puts cost to address nuke disaster up to 81 trillion yen”
But it's not clear you can argue this from historical data.
For comparison, you could argue nuclear weapons are safer than conventional ones, as they have killed fewer people, and that bioweapons are the least dangerous.
The issue is whether there is a tail to the distribution of nuclear event impacts (costs or fatalities), which we may not have seen much of empirically yet.
It seems hard to address that empirically with nuclear (although you could argue that perhaps the same is true for climate change for coal?)
Coal however is a lot more problematic because it's invisible; people are shaken when there's nuclear material leaking out in the water around e.g. Fukushima, but the gradual emission of burning coal waste (33.1 gigatons of CO2 alone; see another comment about coal ash as well) happens unseen. And that's emitted into the air, whereas the (according to wikipedia) 12,000 tonnes of nuclear waste is solid, much easier to keep contained.
I don't think anyone says we've seen the worst possible failures of nuclear plants.
As an extreme example, what if some crazy terrorist deliberately blows one or several up attempting to maximize damage? How bad would that be? How frequently does this occur?
I guess my point is that if there's real risks of that magnitude, they are just as invisible as coal radiation.
>Nuclear power plants are designed with scenarios like terrorist attacks in mind
Look, the world trade center was 'designed with scenarios like plane crashes in mind'. The towers still fell :( No one really expected bad guys to use planes as weapons, and things to get so hot.
Fukushima was designed with tsunamis in mind. No one expected a tsunami so far outside the design envelope.
That's fine, you can't economically design for every eventuality, so you define an envelope.
If you design a system to be robust against the 1 in 50 year Tsunami/attack/whatever, then after 50 years, all events are likely going to be in your margin of safety. If you extrapolate purely from that observed data, you are going to get a real shock 70 years in when a 1-in-100-years storm/attack/whatever occurs.
It's great that things are designed for robustness. But it then takes a long time for the true costs to be naively estimated just by looking at historical data.
Analysis based on 'the problems we have had' is fundamentally rearward looking. There's a value to it, but it's not the complete story. I argue its particularly dangerous with a technology that has rare but catastrophic failure modes.
In particular, it is flawed to look at a limited history of a tech with rare but catastrophic failures/costs, and empirically compare against a tech with more normally distributed failures/costs.
I do understand your point, by the way. I completely agree that we can't account for every possible scenario using history alone. But there's a balance between over-engineering for fantastical events that are difficult to predict and keeping things affordable. Equally, at some point you have to weigh up the very present and deadly effects of coal power plants against the low probability, high impact of a nuclear power plant going boom.
[1] https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-p...
Chernobyl consisted of an unsafe reactor design with a positive void coefficient and a control rod design that locally increased power output as it was being inserted combined with terrible management and operators who did not understand why the reactors power output was low and a complete lack of a containment structure to top it all off.
I genuinely can't envision a scenario like that happening with other non-RBMK reactors. Even if the operators were intentionally trying to just do the most devastation physically possible, it's not like they're going to be able to do anywhere near the damage that Chernobyl did. Trying to compromise the containment structure is not a reasonable goal, they are just far too massive and at least in the U.S. they are designed to take a direct hit by a fully loaded passenger jet without rupturing. Let alone rupturing the massive thick hunk of steel that is the reactor vessel inside of it.
There's still a couple of retrofitted RBMK style reactors operating in Russia but supposedly those don't have the same void coefficient problem, have better management and operational practices, and have better safety systems than the original design. Even if you count those against the safety of new nuclear power plants we're still not as bad off as Chernobyl was.
I hope you're right about the inherent safety of modern reactors, even in the face of malevolence. I don't know enough to contradict you.
In 1605 Guy Fawkes put enough gunpowder under the UK parliament to go through 7-foot concrete walls.
But if it's impossible to blow up a containment vessel, that's fantastic.
All I'd say is that I stand by the point that history to date is only weak evidence for future safety, and that as a general point, it's very hard to build something that survives dedicated adversaries.
Nuclear power is not being built, stockpiled, and used as a deterrent.
There's so many problems with this statement I barely know where to begin.
1. Are we talking total or per kWH of generated power?
2. "Deaths" is a questionable measure. One should look at the environmental impact of digging up, processing (enriching in the case of nuclear), transporting and the storage of byproducts from processing (eg UrF6) as well as spent fuel.
3. Here's the important one: you need to look at failure modes. Coal plants pollute but they also do it very slowly and no coal plant has ever blown up to the point where it's made 1000 square miles of land uninhabitable for decades (to compare, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is 1000 square miles).
4. Coal vs nuclear is a straw man argument. Coal is terrible. Everyone knows this. Coal is becoming the power source for the developing world as it is naturally dying in the developed world, being replaced by renewables and fossil fuels that while not great, are at least better than coal (eg natural gas).
5. How many of the externalities of nuclear power aren't factored into the price? Like the cost of storage and clean ups. These seem to be borne by governments not the companies profiting from the power (of course, some nuclear power in some countries is state-owned and run; depending on the country I'm not sure if this is better or worse).
Personally I find the apologism on HN about nuclear to be disingenuous, exhausting and naive.
2. Coal requires lots more fuel so lots more digging up and transportation, spent fuel is dissipated via atmosphere, as well as solid ash.
3. Concentrated harm vs dispersed harm. still coal. Note that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is great for wildlife - it is basically an environmental preserve, since humans (the largest impact on wildlife & environment) are largely excluded.
4. Focus on "nuclear vs CO2". If you're serious about global warming, nuclear is the only viable technology.
5. Storage and cleanups - there's a lot more for coal than you think. Coal byproducts are one of the largest industrial waste streams. https://www.epa.gov/coalash/frequent-questions-about-2015-co...
Nuclear vs coal is like airplane crashes vs car crashes. Airplane accidents make the news because they are unusual and affect many people in a single incident, even though car crashes kill (and injure) far more people every year (per mile traveled).
The fact that you know the names Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island (probably?) should help you realize how SAFE nuclear is - the exceptions become scare stories for decades.
Then again, per land area wasted , nuclear is 23 Km2 per year vs ... something tiny? Plus the comparison with coal only is unfair.
> 4. Focus on "nuclear vs CO2". If you're serious about global warming, nuclear is the only viable technology.
Here the question is how to remove excess CO2 without destroying the rest of the planet.
https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years...
Centralia is more of a weird natural disaster. It's essentially a slow-motion, underground forest fire. And, like most forest fires, while usually a human with a match is the proximal cause, if the human wasn't there, nature would still have supplied a spark eventually.
• What would the statistical yearly probability of a coal-seam fire be for seams we find, check up on, but never mine? (We know of a few seams in protected areas, but I don't think we know of enough to have any statistical power. Also, the natural catching-fire rate might be, say, one per thousand years, which would be a bit like the pitch-drop experiment in its requirements, yet would still mean that coal seams catch fire pretty much "as soon as" they reach the surface, in geological time.)
• More interestingly: how many coal-seam fires have happened historically in the Earth's 4.2 billion years being around, that finished and burned out all the coal, and now there's just a cave there? Or ex-cave sedimentary layer, given that these caves tend to collapse? Can we tell when such a cave/layer was previously a coal seam? (I assume so, because soot, but can pressure-treated soot be differentiated from other kinds of naturally-occurring mineral striae?)
Nature already scrubs CO2 and actually thrives on the elevated amounts; reducing production means nature will have a chance to catch up. That is, assuming we've not already reached a catastrophic tipping point where e.g. algae (responsible for most CO2 sequestration) die from the heat and the CO2 sequestered in permafrost is released.
Solar (3x), wind (5x), hydro (25x) are much higher land use.
Note that resource extraction use is considered temporary (and in the US, companies are required to pay for restoration, per the link above). Wind uses a large area, but agricultural use can proceed at the same time.
We currently have no viable CO2 removal technology. Nuclear power has no chance of destroying the planet (or even the biosphere).
Let's remove humans from Earth completely and all the environmental problems will be solved.
I tend to agree with your other arguments.
This is simply untrue. Overprovisioned renewables can get us to the point where the few times gas peakers are needed becomes negligible. This is the false "binary choice" that the other comment was pointing out.
Requiring far more investment.
The area of California is 105 million acres, so cover 1/4 of the area of California in wind farms.
Urban land in the US is about 70 million acres (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/major-land-uses/major...), so this would be another 3rd the amount of urban sprawl of all cities and towns in the country.
Solar is a little bit better - only 16,393,234 acres, or 1/6 of California, but you can't really do agriculture on that land like you could with wind farms.
And this is without overprovisioning or increasing electricity use to replace gasoline.
Do you consider either of those options viable? What overprovisioning factor are you going to shoot for?
I don't think it's just a binary choice: I think it's a blended choice, but you've got to have a heavy reliance on nuclear if you want to dramatically cut CO2 emissions.
In the shorter term, I think it's true enough. Germany and Japan (both wealthy, highly developed nations) have both increased consumption of coal in order to move away from nuclear. I won't argue that's what they will do in the longer term though.
A quick google search tells me that 30.1% of US energy generation comes from coal [1] (at least in 2017), with 62.7% coming from fossil fuels overall.
Unless you’re proposing switching to a ‘cleaner’ fossil fuel source, there’s only so much wind/solar/geothermal can contribute until we see major leaps in the available technologies. Until that time I will continue to view them as a supplemental power source, rather than a primary one.
[1]https://toxmap.nlm.nih.gov/toxmap/faq/2009/08/how-much-of-th...
If you look at Europe on the other hand coal is in rapid decline (9% decrease 2017-2018 for example[1]) with many countries now being coal free.
In the UK we measure coal free time in weeks now. I expect us to be coal free for good in only a couple of years.
In some countries this is a straight switch to renewables but but often I think it's a staged switch through natural gas.
1. https://sandbag.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/The-Europe...
But hey, German energy production looks awesome from an environmental perspective!
[0] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/153533/umfrag...
[1] https://i2.wp.com/adveco.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/EU-po...
I'm afraid I can't find the article right now, so I don't have the exact statistics, but I have read that a large coal plant operating normally for 20 years releases more radioactive particles into the atmosphere than Chernobyl did. (There's a lot of trace radioactives in coal.) Nuclear plants that melted down catastrophically every 20 years, like clockwork, might still be safer than coal plants operating perfectly.
There’s no question that coal is a stupid way of generating electricity, but that doesn’t make the dangers of nuclear go away.
Making 1000 square miles of land uninhabitable for decades doesn't kill people, though. (It doesn't even harm the land, in the long term; it's sort of a good thing, decades later, like letting farmland lay fallow.) With modern technology, as was employed at Fukushima, everyone was safely evacuated from the region and literally nobody died from radiation poisoning.
Coal plants pollute globally very slowly. Coal plants pollute locally very quickly, and are capable under the right conditions of disasters just as bad as radiation fallout from our bad old nuclear plants. Have you heard of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London ? Killed 4000, poisoned 100,000 more. And that was just a regular day of the life of London's coal plants, combined with some bad weather. So the coal plants were just fine, and kept on going after that. Meaning that there were other days like that, both before and after (if not quite as bad.) It's like a nuclear power plant that can "melt down" at random, without harming itself, enabling it to keep "melting down" over and over!
> Coal vs nuclear is a straw man argument.
No; it's the real decision that developing countries (and rural areas of developed countries) are making every day: keep building coal plants, or replace some of them with nuclear plants?
Nuclear is a viable consideration for these places in that it is a drop-in replacement for a coal plant that doesn't require any additional infrastructure to connect the plant to the mine+refinery: before, you were shipping rocks on a road to a plant; now you're still shipping rocks (well, pressed rock powder) on a road to a plant. You can even reuse the mining equipment you had from the coal mining! And, often, you have a head-start on the work, as (quoting Wikipedia): "Lignite deposits (soft brown coal) can contain significant uranium mineralization." Your coal mines have probably already excavated some, and now just have it laying around feeding no domestic industry!
Meanwhile, oil or LNG requires building pipelines, different extraction equipment, etc. And affordable solar or wind—which inevitably means domestically produced solar or wind equipment—requires a whole electronics and materials industry, and is only workable in some countries to begin with.
(The real third contender for these countries is hydro power. Doesn't require shipping anything to the plant! Much bigger civil engineering project, though, and each one is a one-off design that has its own devastating failure modes, which makes them possibly more scary to government buyers than nuclear power, where at least you can buy a cookie-cutter copy of a successful plant.)
> depending on the country I'm not sure if [state-owned plants are] better or worse
Usually far better, in that ultimately most externalities come back to bite a government (in the form of e.g. decreased GDP, and thus less taxable income), so they have far more of an incentive to clean up their act than an individual corporation does.
That is a good argument against coal. Why not trying to develop better solutions? That is, including nuclear. The nuclear solution as it stands is obsolete, by the industry's standards, expensive and doesn't make much sense. The next-generation is not ready—more effort needed there. Alternative solutions exist that are both safer and economically sound.
That would be considered a bug, not a feature. I can’t imagine a more NIMBY proposal than building a nuclear reactor.
Also, I think the benefit of small reactors is ease of manufacture. You could probably just put several on a single site next to a HV substation. You get economy of scale that way.
> it feels like we'll need a new set of laws to govern nuclear power
One of the fun things about laws is they're very difficult to ensure they're designed well enough to last for 100+ years in the face of what currently is but unpredictably won't be a stable country.
This isn't an engineering problem. The art to build roofs is wel researched. It's a human problem. That nuclear is only "cheap" if you aren't building roofs over little/medium radioactive waste storage sites, or don't design reactors to be as safe as possible. More safe == more expensive.
I wonder what happens the next time a tsunami similar to the one from 2011 hits the fukushima site. How much better prepared are they now?
From last month:
> The operator of the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant will have to dump huge quantities of contaminated water from the site directly into the Pacific Ocean, Japan’s environment minister has said
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/10/fukushim...
TerraPower has some good designs.
Countries like Germany are all in on renewables, but then you have days where it's cloudy and the wind isn't blowing, and what do they do? Buy from France, who are invested in nuclear.
It could also be argued that what Germany does demonstrates that a combination of renewables and energy trade can work, and thus that more renewable energy in Europe is feasible. Wind is not gonna stop blowing everywhere at once, and solar makes up less of the mix.
By the way, about a third of Germany's renewable energy is not weather dependent (biomass, hydro, trash, a dozen geothermal plants etc.)