Is Nuclear Power Worth the Risk? | Hacker News Reader

Is Nuclear Power Worth the Risk?

newyorker.com

31 pointsmelling46 comments

Nuclear power is the only surefire way to provide for all of our current and future energy needs, especially if you factor in carbon sequestering. On top of all that, per megawatt produced it is the safest form of energy production. Yeah there have been accidents, but they were all preventable if people weren't purposefully kept ignorant of nuclear power and politicians weren't afraid to properly fund and manage it. Fukushima design was made using 50s nuclear technology that's like 15 years past it's first invention. It should have been either decommissioned or rebuilt to modern designs, but of course no one was willing to fund or support such a thing. It's like driving around in a Model-T then being surprised that it doesn't have airbags and seat belts when something goes wrong.

The window of opportunity to redesign reliably has closed. We have too much software now.

> there have been accidents, but they were all preventable if people

You can always spot the nuclear apologist because they gloss over the intractable people issues with managing reactors for literally decades without a single lapse.

I think nuclear history has amply shown that people cannot be trusted to manage reactors.

The horrible reality we're now facing is that once you build a reactor, political forces force re-certification decades beyond their original design - regardless of the interior condition of the reactor.

At the moment of reckoning when a reactor must finally be shutdown, you can bet a swift bankruptcy followed by skyrocketing local electricity rates.

You've hit the nail on the head here. I think the main mistake advocates of nuclear energy make is to talk about the safety and reliability of the technology. But the technology isn't the problem: we know how to safely build and operate nuclear reactors. The issue is the human factor. It only takes one person in a position of authority to cause one mistake that leads to a nuclear disaster. No one competent would ever have let that mistake happen... but how often do idiots rise to positions of power?

Or, put another way, do you trust Congress to make the right rules for operating a nuclear power station?

Fossil fuel is slowly killing all of us and the planet, every second of every single day. Even Chernobyl and Fukushima combined are a mild inconvenience compared to that.

Rejecting nuclear is like taking the car instead of a plane because "planes aren't safe". Yes the fuck ups are more impressive, but if you factor everything nuclear is the lesser evil.

The plane vs car analogy is one I'm going to remember!

Unworthy people get into positions of authority all the time in a soft world. Peace-time generals, etc. People unworthy of power tend to run away from danger, and the worthy are willing to endure it.

Force anyone responsible for the running of a plant to live with their family right next to it. Every plant should be headed by such people, or no plant. A bit like Walter Aigner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veresk_Bridge .

Exactly. The hn crowd is probably especially biased here since it's a lot of geeks with a very idealistic view of the world, where every single individual on this planet is driven by the highest of moral values exclusively. Let me just copy and paste part of a comment I made on the recycling post yesterday:

Look at nuclear power. Might be the greatest and cleanest solution in theory. In practice, look at the revelations after Fukushima. Mismanagement, dramatically negligent maintenance, corruption. Would proper management have prevented the incident? Probably not, but it wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Without the tsunami, this might have continued for years to come and who knows how and when shit would've hit the fan in this alternate reality. Then the shitshow that is storing nuclear waste here in Germany. Again instead of listening to scientists and engineers in the end they dumped the metal containers inside an old salt mine. Big surprise, salt water lead to rapid corrosion and now they have to get them out again, but thankfully the tax payer cover that bullshit.

I don't have an idealistic view of the world. Rather the opposite. Nuclear power can provide for part of the growing energy needs of the ever-growing human population, while petrol supplies will start declining at some point in this century for geological reasons. It might be hard to swallow, but a few nuclear accidents are worth mitigating the worst consequences of climate change and energy peak. Without adequate access to energy, humans in multi-million cities will not be able to survive.

EROI on Solar and Wind power is good, but obviously almost 100% of the energy invested is from fossil fuels. We still spend more energy building solar panels than we receive from it. Which, in a way, is a good sign (it means the solar industry is growing). But no storage technology has been deployed at scale yet (which would reduce the EROI even more). Will it scale enough before a potential energy peak? Will nuclear?

Nuclear power plants can be used as weapons. The explosion of Chernobyl could have taken out half of Europe with radioactivity had it not been dealt with.

If we elect another Kim jong/Stalin, or a neighbouring country does, they could blow up their own reactors to achieve destructive means. Solar and wind don't have that problem. The nuclear accidents are bad enough. Imagine the fallout from a plant in mexico takes out half of Texas, is that an acceptable risk in the pursuit of cheap electricity? Do you want to place the future of international political stability on the ability to regulate and police an industry? Both america and japan, two trustworthy and competent nations have had problems with nukes. Trading one bad scenario for another is not going to help.

Space based solar is a safer bet than nukes.

And yet, most reports place the lives lost due to the Fukishima disaster between 0-200 people - which zero being the most common estimate. Ironically, the decision to close nuclear plants following the Fukishima meltdown likely lead to more deaths than the meltdown itself: https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/11/07/was-shutting-japan...

> think nuclear history has amply shown that people cannot be trusted to manage reactors.

Compared to ? Trusting people to manage coal power plants, mines, off shore platforms, oil tankers, &c. ?

> At the moment of reckoning when a reactor must finally be shutdown, you can bet a swift bankruptcy followed by skyrocketing local electricity rates.

France - lot of nuclear reactors : 13ct per KWh

Germany - shutting down nuclear reactors, still heavily relying on coal : 30ct per KWh

Lapses happen. That’s human nature. It’s having failsafes and enough of them to mitigate and minimize any negative outcomes.

> I think nuclear history has amply shown that people cannot be trusted to manage reactors.

Except that its the safest form of energy production in the Western world and the waste majorities of countries have not had a single death from nuclear power.

Your statement flat out contradicts all evidence.

This isn't an issue with nuclear power, but rather a symptom of a political system focused on short-term goals when the nuclear industry fundamentally operates on the scale of decades at least. Furthermore the problems with nuclear power you've listed are self-fulfilling. Nuclear plants have to have extended life cycles, because people don't want to build new plants, because nuclear plants are having their life cycles extended. Electricity prices skyrocket after the closure of a nuclear plant because a replacement was no built, because people don't want to build nuclear plants, because they point out that electricity prices skyrocket when plants eventually close.

Nuclear was always high risk; Fukushima begged for disaster. Human errors dogged it from the beginning. The region had experienced multiple large tsumani in the century before it was built. Hello? The site started out as a 33-meter bluff, which was lowered to 7-meters. TEPCO was warned about their emergency generators and did nothing. Pretty damn sure these were not engineering decisions.

The waste storage problem is not solved.

And looking at how much the clean up of large scale nuclear processing has and will cost it is not cheap either.

Now that wind and solar are getting to the same price point there is no point in using nuclear reactors for energy generation.

> Now that wind and solar are getting to the same price point there is no point in using nuclear reactors for energy generation.

You need 300 to 1000+ windmill to replace a single nuclear power plant. Might be doable in the US but there is no way to do that in France for example. Same for sun, good look replacing a nuclear plant in northern Europe with a solar farm, it's not Nevada.

Nuclear is on demand, wind and sun are not.

> The waste storage problem is not solved.

Renewable energy storage is not solved.

Thank you for adding some common sense to that debate. Safe nuclear is like "clean coal".

The ultimate solution to the waste problem is fusion.

That's the unfortunate thing about abandoning fission reactors. Fusion is far safer and doesn't produce radioactive waste byproducts.

Well obviously if fusion were a thing we could all switch too I don't think anyone would argue. Unfortunately the reality is for the foreseeable future, fission is the only way to generate power. If you're talking about building a reactor in the next 20 years, you build a fission one.

If somehow we have a breakthrough in fusion technology to make it energy positive, then I have no doubt we'll see a huge increase in people trying to use it.

Fusion solves nothing you can not solve with fission.

With fission you can easily go down to 300 years of storage, this has been known since the 60s but that's often ignored.

Waste is only a significant problem if you want to make it a problem.

Breeder reactors are definitely interesting avenues that I wish we'd gone down from the beginning.

Still 300 years of storage isn't great. It is still a duration of time longer than the US has been a nation.

But its not like you need tons of active management of that waste. Its literally stuff that stands around and does basically nothing.

You could literally just put that waste somewhere in the desert, put it there and leave. The chance that that waste ever actually harms somebody is basically zero.

Basically any cave that isn't likely to flood with massive amounts of water is fine.

> Breeder reactors are definitely interesting avenues that I wish we'd gone down from the beginning.

You don't even need a Breeder for this, a Burner can get there as well.

The waste storage problem is solved: bury it underground in an area with no groundwater. The reason why no permanent storage has been built in the US (they have been built in Finland and in Asia) is because there's actually so little waste. The entirety of the waste from US nuclear power generation fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high.

> per megawatt produced it (Nuclear power) is the safest form of energy production.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/25/chernoby...

Thousands dead, probably more, "up to 1 million under a worst-case scenario study". 5 million people still living on contaminated land, and it's not over.

The figure of 1 million is given by Greenpeace which is not regarded to be even remotely authoritative. Even the figure of 6,000 is disputed. The WHO produced a figure of 4,000 [1]. In particular these estimates were projections about future cancer rates and similar illnesses. Now that we've actually advanced the clock 35 years we can make meaningful examinations of the affected population. As of 2005, less than 50 deaths due to illnesses attributed to radiation pollution from the Chernobyl disaster were recorded.

Furthermore, even if the worst-case figures in the ranges of the tens of thousands are taken as fact nuclear is still the safest forms of energy production.

1. https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

> As of 2005, less than 50 deaths due to illnesses attributed to radiation pollution from the Chernobyl disaster were recorded.

The word "recorded" does a huge amount of obscuring work in that sentence.

I thoroughly recommend the book "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" by Svetlana Alexievich.

After reading that, a double or triple digit number is simply not credible.

So an oral history book written by a private author is more credible than the work of health experts?

And by making that statement, you show yourself to be ignorant of the contents of the book.

The book consists of interviews with people who experienced the events. It's oral history, it even says so explicitly in the title.

You have yet to address question: why is an oral history compiled by someone with a vested interest in selling copies of her book more (and thus, an incentive to produce a more sensational narrative) more authoritative than the multiple studies conducted by experts in radioactive contamination and it's health effects?

And from what I've been able to determine, this book is responsible for several fabrications promulgated by HBO's Chernobyl, which used this book as one of it's main sources. Among others, the "bridge of death" where supposedly everyone who watched the reactor fire from said bridge died from contamination. In reality, people who were on that bridge are still alive today, and have even been interviewed. Oral history is notoriously unreliable for events steeped in folklore like Chernobyl.

> why is an oral history compiled by someone with a vested interest in selling copies of her book more (and thus, an incentive to produce a more sensational narrative) more authoritative than the multiple studies conducted by experts

Some of the people interviewed were experts, on the ground. Much of it talks about how much the "official story" omits. How the "authoritative" version isn't. Which was standard Soviet practice. Since you accuse the author (1) of "vested interests", well they cut both ways.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svetlana_Alexievich

The Soviets weren't the ones conducting the studies I'm talking about. The Chernobyl incident was one of thr most studied industrial disasters of all time, and many Western organizations also studied the disasters and Drew up estimates of the impact. The 6,000 figure I cited above doesn't come from the Soviets Union, it comes from the World Health Organization.

If your reason for trusting on oral history from a private author is distrust incth Soviet Union, you still have to address why this book is more trustworthy than the multitude of of Western studies of the disaster.

Would be great to see a fossil fuels article with the same perspective. Too many people fail to apply the same standards to the status quo as they do to alternatives.

Risk isn't a single unified, fungible, quantifiable thing. We can't properly consider it or make decisions including it without understanding that.

A one in a million change of killing one million people is fundamentally different to a 100% chance of killing one person, even though the average outcome is the same.

You also can't get an honest assessment of risk without asking people to put their money where their mouth is: everyone considers themselves above average drivers, yet insurance companies won't touch some people (often those most convinced they're the lowest risk).

There are major economic and political concerns around any large project too, those add risks not present in the technology itself, and they don't just add new, clean, quantifiable risks, they also multiple (or reduce) existing risks in ways no one can predict or understand.

Before we can try to talk seriously about nuclear (or any other large project with a complex risk profile), we need a better understanding of risk itself. Any article that doesn't start at that point is (at best) uninformed chatter or (at worst) clickbait designed to start arguments.

Here is what a clean and safe energy source looks like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...

Here is what nuclear energy wants to replace: https://endcoal.org/health/

The failure of our society to turn into a nuclear based society will be looked laughed at in the future.

People in a 100 years will say 'they had invented everything they needed in the 1950-60 but failed to do anything'.

Its embarrassing for the human project and in time everybody will realize this.

Many a doctoral thesis will be written about how a whole society can be so dumb an short sighted.

Is the risk of nuclear higher than that of fossil fuel usage?

Climate change is a thing, right now, and we're exacerbating its' effects on an ongoing basis.

Is living worth the risk of dying?

Is radioactive coal ash (and other pollutants), from currently operating coal plants, falling from the skies worth it?

What is the answer to this risk?

(Cough coal cough.)

As proven by Hambach Forest in Germany already.

This fear mongering puts us back decades.

I see it that way: state of the art fossil fuel based energy production is harmful, no matter what. State of the art nuclear based energy production is extremely safe [0]. In a perfect world we'd use 100% clean renewable energy, but we're not living in a perfect world and nuclear is the 2nd best option.

We're literally the proverbial frog being slowly boiled alive.

[0] just don't run shady tests under dubious communistic governments and don't build it next to an ocean over an active seismic zone.

At this point, there is no long teem alternative to baseload power apart from Nuclear.

Inless battery technology allows us to use renewable power as a baseload plant.

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