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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

The sources look good [1] In particular, the deaths as a result of hydroelectric power caught some catastrophic failures. Dams are very, very dangerous constructions, and have a failure mode that makes a nuclear plant look safe by comparison. Just one major Hydroelectric Dam [2], Bangiao, was responsible for on the order of 50,000 deaths related directly to the Dam Failure.

[1] http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

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If 50,000 people were to die from a nuclear incident, a large portion of the public would absolutely lose their minds and insist that a nuclear reactor never again be built on the planet.

50,000 deaths resulting from <choose any other technology> however, is just an unfortunate incident. Hundreds of people will die year after year mining coal with nary a whimper of complaint, but we will hear about people sufferring from thyroid cancer 20 years after Chernobyl until the end of time.

(Sorry, a tad snarky....but also very true, no?)

but also very true, no?

yes. but why do you think that is? people aren't afraid of nuclear for no reason. While it isn't magic, it isn't exactly trivial either, even for experts.

Could you explain to me how the hell fuel in Reactor 4 storage pond at Fukushima 1 went critical?

"Could you explain to me how the hell fuel in Reactor 4 storage pond at Fukushima 1 went critical?"

I can. The term 'critical' is used to describe the point at which fission events are being caused by the neutrons emitted by other fission events. Also called a 'chain reaction.'

Reactor fuel emits neutrons (actually even 'depleted' fuel emits neutrons see half life). Unused (and spent) fuel is stored in storage ponds filled with water because water is an excellent neutron moderator. Thus any neutrons that are emitted by the natural decay, or by internal fission events of the material are absorbed in the water and converted into a (relatively) small amount of heat.

Air is a poor damper of neutrons, and in fact the chance of a neutron hitting an atom in a gas is greatly reduced.

When the water in a fuel storage pond is removed, the naturally occurring neutrons can reach other fuel that is stored in that pond. If they are sufficiently energetic they can cause atoms in the fuel they hit to fission. If they do cause fission then heat is generated and another neutron (note: it maybe 2 I admit I've forgotten the exact reaction with U235) is emitted which might cause another fission event.

Criticality is controlled by moderating the probability that a neutron will create a fission reaction. If you want to store uranium you can do this by either spreading it far apart or by placing it in an environment that moderates neutron flux. Since the latter is as 'simple' as putting it in water, that is the usual option.

The caveat is that your spent fuel will continue to generate heat, if you don't remove that heat eventually the water will boil. If the water boils sufficiently to allow fuel to be exposed to air, the result can be that the fuel passes its criticality threshold. If you can't keep water cool then you can replace it with something that moderates and doesn't boil.

Hopefully the actual point wasn't lost on you: even sitting around not being used, nuclear fuel needs a great deal of expert care and attention.

No, the point isn't lost. And reactor ponds are not the 'best' way to store old fuel, they never have been. They were originally only needed during the refueling cycle and the spent fuel was to be removed off site.

Spent fuel you're not ever going to use again can be melted into boro-silicate glass and not only will it never go critical again, it can't leach into the environment, etc etc. If you've read the Yucca mountain documents I believe they make a pretty good case for 10K yr life expectancy for keeping the fuel out of circulation.

But can you explain why that reactor pond at that time (presumably lost water and) went critical???

The waste was just sitting around an already shut reactor at the time of the Tsunami. After the Tsunami, the workers were doling out water to the other reactors and they just forgot about the cool ponds? Did the pond just spring a leak? The reactors lost power after the Tsunami but we can presume they have it back now.

Just much, why aren't isn't the fuel pallets in these ponds spaces so far apart that one could never interact with another under any circumstances?

"But can you explain why that reactor pond at that time (presumably lost water and) went critical???"

No, but I can speculate.

We "know" [1] that the ponds were boiling at one point. As boiling is the point at which water becomes vapor, if nothing else the ponds will eventually boil dry.

We also know that the spent fuel pools require cooling and that all power has been cut to the plant so there is no cooling.

Temperature rise in the pond will be a function of how many fuel rods are present and the amount of U235 in those rods (are they 'new' waiting to be installed, or 'old' waiting to be disposed? I don't know and its not clear from what I've read what there relative age is.) The uranium is decaying to lead [2] and as it decays, and its decay products decay. It generates heat. Not enough heat to be a useful source of energy, but certainly enough heat to keep the water boiling.

My speculation is that since the other electrical infrastructure has been severely damaged around the plant (and they do not have power back yet [3]) that the equipment that was responsible for circulating water in the pond through convection coolers isn't running and natural convection has either been disrupted or is insufficient to keep the water temperature down.

This combines to allow the water to boil, and if the spent fuel rods in the water were to be uncovered, there is sufficient U235 remaining in the rods present for the group to reach crititcality.

"why aren't isn't the fuel pallets in these ponds spaces so far apart that one could never interact with another under any circumstances?" because the contingency plans did not include a triple failure of main power, diesel backup, and battery backup. I suspect in the future two things will be true, one there will be stronger limits on how many rods you can keep in the pond, and there will be a passive cooling requirement.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-sci-0316-ja...

"Reports from the scene indicate the water in the cooling pond is boiling vigorously and engineers fear it will soon boil away, exposing the fuel rods, which would allow them to melt. "

[2] http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/chemweek/radiation/radiation.htm...

[3] http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html

"Attempts to return power to the entire Daiichi site are also continuing."

Without any hard data, I really doubt it went critical. Unless I'm faced with incontrovertible evidence, I'm going to conclude that if there was a fire, it was due to failure to remove decay heat, not due to a criticality excursion.

It's possible, of course. But I just don't think anyone would be dumb enough to put the fuel in such an arrangement that lack of water in the pond would cause a criticality excursion.

It almost certainly didn't went critical. Spent fuel doesn't have enough U-235 for criticality. Moreover steam (boiling water) isn't a very good neutron moderator. I can't do the calculations but I seriously doubt it. Should the fuel have gone critical, a lot more would have happened than a fire. The damage would make the site comparable to Chernobyl.

http://www.digitalglobe.com/downloads/featured_images/japan_...

White smoke is not a sign of criticality...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents#P...

I think people are less critical towards casualties from damns because it’s water, and therefore perceived as natural.

I think if 50 000 dies from a oil-related incident you would get some serious backslash against fossil fuels as well. (Electric generation from oil or gas is already quite controversial here in Norway.)

> 50 000 dies from a oil-related incident you would get some serious backslash

30,000 deaths a year from coal pollution in the US alone... Where's the backlash?

People already hate coal because of the pollution and the health problem miners can develop. Public sentiment doesn't have that much further to drop.

That's why you almost never see coal fired power stations these days, right?

Because when something happens, it's always because a majority of people want it to.

30,000 deaths a year?

What you mean to say 30,000 people a year die some amount of time earlier than if we had no coal burning at all. That doesn't mean it killed 30,000 people as they were walking home from the grocery store at age 25 and a wall of coal came crushing down the street because the coal dam broke. So it's not really comparing Apples to Apples at all.

If slow killing by coal pollution is OK, then slow killing by radiation is OK too.

So many facepalm moments reading these threads, maybe I should just quit. What evidence would it take to convince you? Not some hypothetical "people" out there whose rationalizations conveniently say that any flavor of death that's old enough to be considered "commonplace" is okay, but nuclear=hubris. You ought to be smarter. You have seen the numbers. Where's the stickup? Do you think Chernobyl secretly killed 100x more people than they say it did, or what? Or do you admit to having a double standard?

> What you mean to say 30,000 people a year die some amount of time earlier than if we had no coal burning at all.

That's the same way people get to tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl, isn't it? There were a few thousand direct deaths and a great deal more lives shortened to whatever degree.

Maybe, just like there's a "banana equivalent dose" for radiation we need some kind of "cigarette equivalent risk" to measure increased cancer risk & shortened life spans?

You are being selective about the truths you raise. You are also downplaying peoples reaction to massive numbers of deaths from other technologies, saying it is nary a whimper of complaint. Some would argue that 50,000 have already died from a nuclear incident, and a large portion of the public do insist that a nuclear reactor never be built again. Any of these people would have the same problem with building a dam over a populated area, they would insist that one never be built again. Go and ask someone. There isn't a choice that has to be made between coal, hydroelectric dams or nuclear. Look at the waste you are surrounded with. The difference in reaction to the technologies you are noting is fear of the aftermath of an accident, leaving an area uninhabitable for generations.

> Some would argue that 50,000 have already died from a nuclear incident.

Yes, some WOULD argue, but they would do so without the benefit of factual knowledge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents...

I doubt your qualifications to make that statement "without the benefit of factual knowledge". The two biggest disasters listed on your source, the wikipedia link are from locations that were behind the iron curtain at the time. I cannot state categorically to the contrary either for that reason. The statistics for the worst nuclear incident to date are provided on that page by the IAEA. Here is an excerpt from their mission statement[1]: "assists its Member States, in the context of social and economic goals, in planning for and using nuclear science and technology for various peaceful purposes, including the generation of electricity, and facilitates the transfer of such technology and knowledge in a sustainable manner to developing Member States;"

http://www.iaea.org/About/mission.html[1]

edit: IAEA article II "Objectives" of their statute[2]: "The Agency shall seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world. It shall ensure, so far as it is able, that assistance provided by it or at its request or under its supervision or control is not used in such a way as to further any military purpose."

http://www.iaea.org/About/statute_text.html[2]

So then are you making an assertion ("Some would argue that 50,000 have already died from a nuclear incident") which you also argue can never be proven true?

Yes, that's it. My wording is terrible. I'm saying there's an argument. I'm not saying which side of the argument is right or wrong. As time goes on, it becomes more and more difficult to know the extent. Only in the fullness of time could the extent possibly be known due to the delay in related deaths. It won't be known because it hasn't been monitored, and there are conflicting statistics.

I'll point it out again: These figures are under dispute[1] and not "factual knowledge".

It seems only the IAEA is claiming 4000 deaths/cancers, whereas other studies claim tens of thousands or even a million[2].

I'll also repeat my other favorite argument in this recurring discussion: Chernobyl happened in a sparsely populated area that was quickly evacuated. Have you considered what the figures could look like if a similar disaster hits, say, the Tokyo area?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Assessing_th...

[2] http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Annals/Detail.aspx?cid=f3f3...

> my other favorite argument...if a similar disaster hits, say, the Tokyo area?

It has probably already been considered, which is why there is no nuclear plant within 100km or so from Tokyo, and the Chernobyl exclusion zone has a radius of 30km. So, that is a hypothetical situation.

http://www.japannuclear.com/nuclearpower/program/location.ht...

>"a large portion of the public do insist that a nuclear reactor never be built again."

...and the entire point of the OP is to point out that they are wrong to do so-- or at the very least, that this opinion is irrational.

The opinion would be irrational if it were shown that nuclear power will save lives compared to the other sources or reducing power consumption, and these charts do not show that.

Reducing power consumption how much? To zero? By half? That's a bit of a moving target.

Regarding the alternate studies you have posted (which, btw, I really do appreciate): If one were to include the upper limits of them, would that make nuclear more dangerous than fossil fuels? Than widespread "alternatives"?

Please note that I'm not trying to be snarky here. I appreciate your posts and would genuinely like to hear your thoughts.

I haven't posted any alternate studies, I would have to take time to source them. Maybe you didn't notice?

If you bought a kill-a-watt or something similar, you could investigate how much money you can save on appliances. Same goes for energy saving bulbs, based on my own power bills, before and after, I saved about 75 percent when I started to make an effort. It would be foolish to attempt any extrapolation based on my anecdote, but I would surmise there are massive consumption savings to be made. Particularly in the home, insulation and in transport. Particularly startling to me is the frequently thrown about statistic that 5% of the energy consumption of the world is coming from datacentres. And that it was 20% more efficient to use DC to each blade than have a PSU doing ac/dc conversion in each.

I have had a look at the calculation in article linked: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...

The source on Chernobyl (there are lots of caveats given about how it was a once off freak incident and these figures are absolute worst case): "If those possible 4000 deaths occur over the next 25 years, then with 2800 TWh being assumed average for 2005 through 2030, then it would be 4000 deaths over 112,000 TWh generated over 45 years or 0.037 deaths/TWh."

If one were to include the upper limits, the earlier upper bound figure mentioned was 1 million, assuming they died over 112,000 TWh it would be 1000000/4000 * 0.037 deaths/TWh which is 9.25 deaths per TWh. It looks pretty dangerous then, given that. It is grotesque doing this sort of calculation in the midst of unfolding events.

below is the source chart, figures in TWh:

Coal – world average 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)

Coal – China 278

Coal – USA 15

Oil 36 (36% of world energy)

Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)

Biofuel/Biomass 12

Peat 12

Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)

Wind 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)

Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)

Hydro - world including Banqiao) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)

Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

(edit: mistakes, , more mistakes, formatting, reproduced table came out on one line)

> 9.25 deaths per TWh. It looks pretty dangerous then, given that.

I'm sorry, you're saying that less deaths per TWh than Oil, Coal, Biofuel, and Peat looks pretty dangerous? That looks really safe to me, at least in comparison to our other options.

> It is grotesque doing this sort of calculation in the midst of unfolding events.

I'll give you that, if you admit that it's also grotesque to use current events to support related agendas, given that our information about them isn't nearly as comprehensive as it could be.

There's no mention of how the figure for Biofuel is arrived at so I'm not sure that I can agree with it (the idea that arable land is spent on biofuel, thus driving up food prices was doing the round a while ago). With that possible exception, my opinion is that all four are pretty dangerous. It seems they are all at least twice as dangerous as Natural gas. I disagree that it looks really safe compared to the others. I agree that it is grotesque to use current events to support related agendas.

This may actually be true. Uranium decays into radioactive radon sooner or later. Radon is a gas so it escapes the earth. People breathe the stuff and inside the lungs it decays into polonium-210 sooner or later. By mining the uranium and sticking it into a reactor, the radon is removed from the atmosphere. Wether or not this benefit outweighs the deaths from Chernobyl and others is a very good (and still open) question.

By looking at the statistics however, switching all coal plants to nuclear reactor would save lives (mostly miners)

The opinion may well be irrational, but if it is widely held, would it not then have democratic validity?

Which is the problem with democracy.

Of course it would. Should it? I'd argue "no".

Depends on their surface reflectivity.

A few 10s of European people die at chernobyl = crisis, ban nuclear now. A few 10,000s of Indians die at Bhopal = so what.

Of course sometimes you have to be a little more discriminating. A damn breaks in China killing poor yellow people = so what. A reactor accident in Japan affecting rich yellow people = crisis.

Strangely 1800 people being killed on trains in a Tsunami doesn't seem to matter. Germany hasn't decided to cancel ICE services between Munich and Wien until the track can be made Tsunami proof.

"A few 10s of European"... I think you should correct Wikipedia. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Chernobyl_dis... "Estimates of the total number of deaths attributable to the accident vary enormously, from possibly 4,000 to close to a million".

That's including 0.01% lifetime extra cancer risk * 100M people

If you are going to do that then a single cigarette ad on a formula 1 car kills more people than Hiroshima.

then how are you counting?

If you are going to do that then a single cigarette ad on a formula 1 car kills more people than Hiroshima.

Maybe not a single ad, but certainly cigarettes do, and it is a valid way to count.

Forget wikipedia and go the site of the World Health Organisation. http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2006/9241594179_eng.pd... http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/chernobyl_di...

The reports range from 4000 extra cancer deaths (of 100 000 deaths) to 10 000 deaths out of a million. While 10000 isn't small, it represents a 1% increase in cancer related deaths. Stricter smoking laws can save more people than a nuclear stop.

Probably because they were safer on the trains than they would have been in cars? You'd still have people in transit, and I'm not a mechanical engineer or physicist but I'd think it was obvious that trains hold up a little better to giant waves than the typical japanese car.

There is less radiation risk from normally operating German nuclear power stations than there is from all the radionuclides the extra coal burning stations will emit.

Although since Germany hit on the idea of exporting it's dirty coal to Poland, burning it there and importing the power they will be east europeans getting the cancer.

Well, I was talking about being hit by tsunamis, not radiation.

I prefer nuclear power to coal myself but I must clarify that "normally operating nuclear power stations" aren't what people worry about with nuclear power.

Yes, but people don't give a flying fuck about coal or coal seam fires when globally coal seam fires release 40 tons of mercury into the atmosphere, 3% of the worlds annual CO2 emissions. Not to mention they're releasing a crap-load of radioactive materials on their own.

People are idiots. They worry about nuclear power going "wrong", but don't worry about all the other far more dangerous power technologies working "right" and being more deadly.

Nuclear power is like a rubber bullet. When it goes wrong, it can kill someone but 99.9% of the time it's phenomenally safe. Coal and Oil are essentially like lead bullets. They can kill someone each and every time they're fired, but people are used to it so they don't care.

If Chernobyl had been a dam burst incident, people would be living in Pripyat right now.

What if a nuclear disaster like that happened next to say, Philadelphia, and left the area uninhabitable for 10,000 years?

Haven't people been visiting Pripyat and finding it to be habitable to a lot of species of life? It won't be a wasteland for 10,000 years. And Chernobyl was so pooring designed it is not analagous to everything else (as was the damn that killed 50,000 people).

There is life, to be sure, but it's not 100% healthy. The area is still too radioactive for humans to dwell in without shortening their lives and it's not going away any time soon.

We'll see in the next 50 years how it goes having nuclear power plants operating in Africa, Indonesia, the Middle East, etc. New reactors are better designed, but I still don't trust 80% of the governments or corporations in the world to responsibly operate anything nuclear.

Are you joking? It's only 'habitable' in the sense that wildlife doesn't drop dead the moment it enters the exclusion zone. The animals are still receiving substantial amounts of radiation, and will continue to suffer for decades. The worst areas will be dangerous for centuries.

Towns like Picher, Oklahoma, will still be toxic when the sun goes out.

Radioactive Ceasium and Strontium are a pain for a few decades - lead, mercury and cadmium are for ever.

Non-sequitor. Just because something else is bad doesn't make this situation any better.

Oh my god they had a nuclear accident in Japan - we must shut down our nuclear reactors and instead pump out many millions of tons of dangerous radioisotopes and chemical poisons from new coal plants instead.

It's standard knee jerk procedure. We had a rail accident (the first in 10years) so the reaction was to close a bunch of inter city lines for months while they checked everything. Where did all those extra travellers go? onto the roads!

I hope the government doesn't hear about the problems with Toyota in america - they would then ban ABS and give everybody Tiger tanks to commute on.

I think most people who are opposed to nuclear are hoping governments and industry will seriously pursue more sustainable and non-toxic sources of power, not coal.

Radioactive metals are still toxic as heavy metals even when they're not radioactive, though. Uranium, for instance, is just as bad as lead, or worse.

Also habitable in the sense that a lot of people still live there, in ways extremely similar to how they did before, with (apparently) few ill effects. See http://outsideonline.com/adventure/travel-pf-201103-chernoby...

I'd like to offer you some prime property in Pripyat for your home. If you buy today, I'll even throw in a free well-drilling for your water supply.

And if Chernobyl had been a dam burst, it is likely a great many more people would have died, and much more quickly.

EDIT: Despite the downvotes, this is not a trivial point, and is precisely why the OP is getting so much attention.

So, if you are allowed to use Chernobyl as an example of "typical" nuclear power installations, and come to the logical conclusion that all other nuclear reactor installations in the world carry the same risk, then can I similarly use the Banqiao Dam as an example of a "typical" hydroelectric dam, and declare that all dams in the world therefore carry the same risk?

You sure can. I think his point is still valid. Nuclear disasters are unique in that the damage from then tends to last FAR longer then the damage from any other type of disaster.

People still live near three mile island.

That accident was safely contained.

I agree, and even without nuclear disasters, no human society has ever lasted for as long as nuclear waste must be looked after.

Nuclear waste is a US only issue. It doesn't exist in any other country. Buy some CANDU reactors from Canada and you can burn your nuclear waste for energy.

You can't be serious... nuclear waste is a huge issue in pretty much every country that has nuclear power plants. Half of Germany goes insane every time there is a transport of nuclear waste from one temporary storage location to another.

The parent comment to yours is serious. CANDU reactors can run off fuel that is considered 'waste' from light water reactors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candu#Fuel_cycles

Every other nuclear power reprocesses their waste into fuel.

The reason the US doesn't is partly nimby-ism and partly strategic, waste contains plutonium and if we need to make more nukes to fight the commies we will be glad we didn't reprocess it all.

CANDU doesn't chemically re-process it (no purification). It just physically breaks it up into fuel rods that it can use. A CANDU reactor can run on unprocessed, raw (just-pulled-it-out-of-the-ground) uranium, which light water reactors cannot do without chemical reprocessing.

You can't accurately assess the total impact of the Chernobyl accident yet because the damage is still on-going and the exclusion zone will still be hazardous to human health long after you and I are in our graves. The presumption that knowledge of the nature of the danger and the geographical boundaries of the exclusion zone will be preserved and passed on to future generations for the entire duration that the area remains a danger to human health is rather dubious. History is riddled with examples of ancient civilizations whose secrets are lost to us. As members of the technical elite of our society, we tend to implicitly assume that knowledge will be preserved and technological progress will continue in an unbroken chain, but that doesn't necessarily make it so. Technological "dark ages" have happened before in which much that was known was lost. How can we be certain that anyone will still know the location of the exclusion zones and be aware of the radiation risk 500, 1000, 2000 years from now? If we're honest with ourselves, we will admit that we have saddled future generations with the burden of a booby trap that will likely still be causing much suffering and death when our present civilization is as ancient as the Parthenon is now.

I think he's trying to say Chernobyl was an outlier, a faulty design which melted down under completely outrageous circumstances, and due to today's safety standards it won't happen again. Therefore Chernobyl can't really be used to say nuclear power is unsafe.

The point is that the consequences of a disaster like Chernobyl are so nasty and so long-lived that, if we are to continue building and operating nuclear power plants, we have a responsibility to ensure that such "outliers" never happen unless the earth sustains a direct hit from an asteroid or the Yellowstone supervolcano is erupting (in which case, we're screwed like the dinosaurs anyway). If we can't do that then we have no business being in the nuclear power business. Failure is unacceptable. The situation in Fukushima is not the same as Chernobyl, but that doesn't mean that what is happening there is acceptably safe. We shouldn't be seeing news articles stating that "primary containment feared breached" or that the water level in the spent fuel pools is low (source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870389970457620...).

From the most pro-nuclear article I've seen thus far: "The earthquake which hit on Friday was terrifically powerful, shaking the entire planet on its axis and jolting the whole of Japan several feet sideways. At 8.9 on the Richter scale, it was some five times stronger than the older Fukushima plants had been designed to cope with." - excerpt from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/14/fukushiima_analysis/

The article spins this as though it is some magnificent testament to the quality of the engineering design. I read something like that and then look at this historical list of Japanese earthquakes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Japan) and the thought that comes to my mind is, "Why the fsck didn't they build it to withstand a 9.5 and a tsunami so they'd have some goddamn margin of safety?" Why is it considered sufficient to have a system where unavailability of power to run pumps is the single point of failure in all of the cooling systems except for the inadequate-to-do-the-whole-job 8-hour battery-powered system? Why haven't we come up with a completely passive system capable of cooling the reactor if all else fails? The bottom line is, if you want the public to put their trust in nuclear power, then build the reactor so that even a 9.5 earthquake + tsunami is a total non-event.

So in order to get the trust of the public, all we have to do is build a super safe prototype reactor and wait for a 9.5 earthquake and direct tsunami hit to come along and have the damn thing survive? Sorry, but that just means we'll be building more coal plants for at least the next 100 years.

If we managed to get a man to the moon, I think we can figure out a reliable system for backup power at earthquake and tsunami prone plants. And if that fails, add a couple more levels of containment. Some of the latest designs don't require external power for cooling, so once all the old reactors are decommissioned, we shouldn't run into this kind of problem again.

You don't have to wait for a 9.5 earthquake to come along to test a design. That's what computer models are for. How do you think they came up with the estimate of what magnitude of a quake the existing design could withstand (assuming that the statement that this quake was "five times stronger" than what the plant was rated to handle has some basis in fact and isn't just a number plucked out of thin air)?

What if a nuclear disaster happened in Hiroshima or Nagasaki? What would those cities look like today?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hiroshima_montage.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nagasaki_C1414.jpg

An accident at a nuclear facility is rather dfferent than the effects of a nuclear weapon. The radiation exposure produced is much more gradual. It's not as instantly lethal as a bomb of course, but the effects of Chernobyl are still lingering.

Obviously they didn't have to encase Nagasaki or Hiroshima in a concrete sarcophagus. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fairly small, and air burst vs. ground burst. The amount of radioactive material in the bombs is a tiny fraction of what was released at Chernobyl.

People are fond of saying you can't compare Chernobyl to other reactors, etc. but it's all we had until recently. I'm sure we'll have some better examples in the future, but for now, according to the IEAE: http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/features/chernobyl-15/cherno-...

"How does Chernobyl’s effect measure up to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

The accident at Chernobyl was approximately 400 times more potent than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima"

I assume things would look different in Japan if we had dropped a couple hundred of those bombs vs. one.

So your argument is that as long as the asset or land is reusable then it does not matter if people died ?

So if you were driving a buick roadmaster and got killed in the car. the fact that they could hose of the dash and reuse the car is what matters ?

Or that in World War 2, when the tank crew of a Sherman tank was killed they could refurb it and send out a new crew, does that mean it is somehow better for the first crew ?

I think it's mostly just a rooted fear of anything “nuclear”, but there's an argument to be made that the damage caused by dams is localized in a way that nuclear disasters can't be. In reality, of course, it's quite impractical to move everything away from dam failure zones.

Either way, historical data is very valuable and in that light modern nuclear plants are pretty safe but I think potential damage should play some role in the determination of course…obviously, the best thing would be to go full-tilt renewables (with pretty much only hyperlocal failures) but the question is can we get there without additional nuclear power even if everyone fully invests in it? If nuclear didn't linger such a long time after the plants are decommissioned, the risk/reward of building new nuclear to tide us over the next 20-30 years would be a no-brainer.

I think it's an important discussion that I'm not quite sure can be had rationally – but even that's better than not having it at all.

IIRC, the reason plants linger so long after decommission is because (at least in the US) it's illegal to reprocess the waste, which really isn't waste and has lots of useful stuff in it.

It can't all be reprocessed (which itself is somewhat hazardous not least because of the transport required) so you'll still have a sizable chunk of stuff that needs to be contained for tens of thousands of years.

>If nuclear didn't linger such a long time after the plants are decommissioned

It is at least theoretically possible to eliminate nuclear waste. I'm confident that with research into yet undiscovered reactor types we can reprocess and reuse the long-lived radioactive byproducts into byproducts with lifespans measured in centuries rather than millions of years.

Or we could throw it into the sun (yes, exploding rockets, I know. It's not an especially viable option, but it exists).

I'd wager you're correct to an extent, at least, but I'm not sure if it's still wise to spend the research on that rather than renewables – even allowing for the fact that there're scientists and facilities that can/want only help with the nuclear side, there's funding to be considered.

>Hundreds of people will die year after year mining coal with nary a whimper of complaint

Doesn't anyone die mining Uranium ores?

With Chernobyl the fallout was measured across the whole of Europe whilst with some poor workers getting "miners lung" the effect is localised to those who were getting paid danger money to work in mines anyway.

Acid rain used to be big news ...

I don't believe your assertion incidentally.

7 billion tons per year of coal is mined. 60,000 tons of Uranium is mined (a few tens of millions of tons of ore).

Yeah, saw those figure wrt the other thread and wondered how many tons of non-uranium are mined in order to extract the uranium. I decided I didn't know enough about uranium mineral deposition to come to a reasonable analysis and couldn't readily find such information. Is uranium ore found in large seams like coal?

Others following one of my other comment have basically said that in situ leeching is the only method used but I doubt that for several reasons. Not least of which that I gathered uranium is mined alongside other metals and I doubted acid leeching would work for all of them at the same time.

From the Source Material:

"Uranium mining is a lot safer because insitu leaching (the main method of uranium mining) involves flushing acid down pipes. No workers are digging underground anymore. Only about 60,000 tons of uranium are needed each year so that is 200 times less material being moved than for coal plants."

Yeah, I read about the leaching process (for the previous thread), which sounds good - also enclosed vehicles and such. What I don't get is that wikipedia only included information (the other day when I looked) about open leaching as an optional method of extraction whilst everyone is saying that basically no other methods are used other than in situ (I only readily found information pertaining to experimental use of that in Australia).

The in situ leaching process, as I understood it, requires a quite specific geology and is moderately low in efficiency. The acid goes down pipes and then leaches the uranium out of permeable layers of rock, you suck it up from the bottom and voila (or did I misunderstand). What you can't have is the acid washing away or possibly worse the acid washing the uranium away into the local water supply/environment.

I'm still surprised that basically they never have any accidents at uranium mines/processing plants whilst it seems that everyone who works in the solar industry can't even step on a roof without falling off.

The majority of the worlds uranium is mined in Australia and Canada, countries with exceptional health and safety standards.

The comparison isn't exactly fair since uranium mines are in deep hard rock which is inherently safer - but in comparison a US coal mine is an insanely dangerous place. And I don't imagine standards in China are much better.

The World Nuclear Association (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf23.html) says that the major production is in Kazakhstan but that as you assert if you add Aus+Can production together it does beat the Kazakh production marginally. But I can still say based on those figures that in fact the majority is produced in Kazakhstan and Namibia - I'm afraid I have no info about their safety record but do know (see these links) that they use strong acid leeching which has been considered harmful everywhere else (this could be due to specific geology, or not).

They also say that "Conventional underground & open pit [accounts for] 57%" of global Uranium production.

Moreover the analysis in the OP article appears to be an historic one though whilst wide scale use of ISL (aka ISR) leeching appears to be relatively new.

Further pages from WNA (eg http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf27.html which I've not corroborated) - says that Australia didn't use ISL (for Uranium) until 2000 in Beverley (I've seen other refs say it was trialled in Aus in 1997). So presumably before that they used heap leeching or regular mining methods?

Quoting that second WNA link:

"In 2009, a total of 18,262 tU was produced by ISL, this being 13,473 tU in Kazakhstan, 2429 tU in Uzbekistan, 1217 tU in USA, 583 tU in Australia and 560 tU in Russia. This was 36% of world total production, a share which has risen steadily from 16% in 2000."

WRT my query elsewhere about extracted ore, the BHP BIlliton facility (2 fatalities since opening; largest deposit known of apparently) extracted "933,000 tons of uranium oxide concentrate" in one quarter of 2007 (http://uk.reuters.com/article/2007/12/12/us-bhpbilliton-olym...). Forecasts for BHP Billiton (http://antinuclear.net/2010/11/17/bhp-shareholder-opposes-da... - note apparent bias of source).

Like I've said elsewhere this is a complex field, one that appears to be being misrepresented.

Edit: other notes 1 - US production was 98% ISL in 1993, http://books.google.com/books?id=pXbdrH6_AVEC&lpg=PR28&#...

In addition, uranium mining tends to use acid leaching, which doesn't send as many people underground.

> Doesn't anyone die mining Uranium ores?

As you've seen from the other respondents, the answer to your question, essentially, is "no".

What most people don't realize is that there is uranium and thorium in coal itself. If you're worried about 'nuclear fallout' from power, worry about coal and not nuclear. By the way clean coal doesn't fix this because if they could filter it out, they'd be able to get more energy from the uranium than the coal itself.

Good god, that's the biggest non-point I've heard in my life.

You could've worked in something about potassium content of bananas while you were at it.

It depends on how much there is, doesn't it?...

It does, and the answer is "trace amounts".

Your body has trace amounts of uranium as well. What's everyone so worried about?! Obviously the substance is perfectly safe.

On average, one `Banana equivalent dose' per banana: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

And no, that's not a joke; it's a convenient measure of low radiation levels. Bananas are more naturally radioactive due to high potassium contents.

The dose due to actinide particulates from coal is a non-negligible part of your annual exposure.

I believe his point runs along the lines of, ``there are radioactive elements released with coal smoke''. Which may be a big surprise to many people.

NB., a fun experiment: explain a smoker that the cigarette contains proverbial half of the Mendeleyev table.

In any case, the theoretical content of fissible elements in coal may be significant, but it doesn't seem to be economical to extract it at this point. We have heaps of uranium ore, and nuclear fusion seems to be around the corner.

Yeah, but there's trace radioactive elements in literally everything on earth.

Hence, the biggest non point I've ever seen in my life. Unless coal is actually radioactive to a noteworthy significantly-more-than-a-banana extent, which I probably would have heard of by now (not that I haven't been wrong before).

You are right about the facts. And perhaps that's a non-point on well-educated HN. But the general public seems to be under-appreciating the pervasiveness of natural radiation, and freaking out about any nuclear contraptions. In some countries you can't even import those glowing tritium keychains :-(

His point has little to do with bananas and much to do with the danger of radiation and how it is commonly attributed to nuclear power plants rather than coal.

Here is an example of someone else making the same point:

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.ht...

heh i still smoke. im less interested in finding out all the ways i could die, and much more interested in finding all the ways to live.

On a very off-topic note, I fell madly in love with Totally Wicked Mini DSE901 [1]. And since I started composing liquids to my taste, I'm half-way in heaven ;-)

----

[1] http://www.totallywicked-eliquid.com/products/electronic-cig...

Fusion power is 20 years away and always will be.

Less snarkily, is there actually good reason to believe that we're any closer to usable fusion?

The second space race is a reliable reason to believe.

Several governments bet big (well, perhaps medium) money on race to the Moon, to extract helium-3 [3] from water ice in there. A key component to commercial nuclear fusion -- and with only small-time other uses in medicine and stuff.

----

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Fusion_reactions

Actually physicists are saying "Fusion power is 20 years away" without sniggering now!

I'm gonna call "citation needed" on this one. The clean coal part, specifically. Reasons:

Technically, it should be possible to filter out uranium. Thorium, too. Both are heavy enough, it should be possible to centrifuge them out of just about any mixture, unless the compounds they're in are too tightly bound with lighter molecules by intermolecular forces. Even then, I would expect them to find their way "down", even if they had to drag some of the nonradioactive portion with them.

The amount of energy you get out of the coal or the uranium is a function of not only the amount of energy in each, but their relative quantity, as well. If there's not enough uranium present to extract a significant portion, I'd have to wonder if there's really enough to put out as much energy as the coal's total output.

Taking it a little further, if there isn't enough to extract, is there really enough to pose a significant health risk? We're exposed to a certain amount of background radiation on a daily basis already. How much more does the uranium in coal add to this? Again, I'm tempted to doubt it's significant, if there's not enough to be extracted.

So, do we have reliable numbers on this?

Google "coal fired power plant radiation"

The following two articles cite "a 1978 paper for Science, J. P. McBride at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)"

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.ht...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is...

and Wikipedia says, during normal operation the effective radiation dose from a coal plant is 100 times that of a nuclear power plant, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_station#Radio...

I took a class once that discussed the relative safety of nuclear power and one of the key points the instructor made was the fact that radiation levels in the vicinity of a coal fired power plant are actually higher than in the vicinity of a nuclear power plant under normal operating conditions.

I've heard a similar story. The story was about a safety inspection at a nuclear power plant where they opened some large blast doors and the radiation alarms went off. After a while they realized that the radiation monitors were responding to a coal plant something like 25 miles away and the wind had shifted toward the nuclear plant.

The common conception is that nuclear waste stays for a long time and thus 50K immediate deaths would be translated into 500K+ deaths later.

Also, 50K deaths all at once for any given energy source would also freak people out. I think that most people would unconsciously consider a coal mine disaster or a broken dam as "death from occupation" or "death from random accident" rather than "death from energy source". The unknown-ness of nuclear power tends to make people credit it directly with the deaths around it.

And yes, people have a psychological fear of the unknown. Evolutionarily, this is rather clearly justified.

If the education level in all industrial countries was raised to the point that the average person felt they had a strong understanding of nuclear power, the fear of it quite possibly would subside. But the cost of this might be considerably greater than the cost of converting to an "alternative" energy source.

>If the education level in all industrial countries was raised to the point that the average person felt they had a strong understanding of nuclear power

Considering the average person seems to be pushing the limits of their mental abilities differentiating between the debt and the deficit, for example, I for one am not optimistic it's even possible to have widespread understanding of nuclear power.

Well, the alternative to understanding a particular technology is blind faith in a particular technology.

The world's dictators show us only some of the problem with blind faith. The other problem with blind faith is that it tends to turn to blind hatred when disappointed, especially when a demagogue is close at hand to harness that blind faith in a different direction.

Choose whichever side of the political spectrum you consider ridiculously uninformed. Them in power is the alternative to a populace that encompass how the heck our society operates.

Sure, if you conveniently ignore all of the children born in the Ukraine and Belarus with birth defects due to exposure, the plant workers and soldiers who were sickened or died heroically trying to shutdown the reactor, the increased incidence of cancer, the poisoning of prime agricultural land, I guess Chernobyl was no big deal.

And by the way, dam-building for power generation isn't exactly a popular practice today, particularly in areas were unmaintained industrial revolution era dams burst every few years.

I'm certainly willing to consider all of that, is there any authoritative documentation from an unbiased source I could read on comprehensive deaths from Chernobyl?

Not really. The official report used the numbers self reported by the USSR (not known for its bureaucratic honesty) and TORCH (The Other Report on CHernobyl) was funded by the environmental movement. So we can lower bound the deaths by 4,000 and upper bound them by 1,000,000, but after that you are on your own.

I did my own looking and came to the conclusions that "deaths" is the wrong metric, and "expected years of life lost" is the right metric. When someone dies at age 45 instead of age 60, is that a Chernobyl-caused death? What about at age 50 instead of 60? 59 instead of 75? 2 instead of 70? The answer gets more complicated the closer you look.

Ballpark: tens of thousands to even hundreds of thousands of "effective deaths" from Chernobyl, where an "effective death" is 45 years of life lost, collected from multiple affected people. Relatively few immediate deaths.

And what would the equivalent number for coal mining/burning be?

See the link that started this whole conversation. It has pretty good data, the only questionable part was the fact that their nuclear safety data involved taking self-reported fatalities from the USSR.

Coal is far worse than nuclear by every metric (environmental effects, deaths per TWh, etc etc) in any sane accounting scheme.

33,808 deaths in 2009 from traffic fatalities

http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

Yes; people also freak out when a few dozen people die of a mysterious new disease like Ebola, even though thousands die every year in car accidents. The reason is not "WAHHH viruses WAHHH," it's that sometimes, mysterious new diseases become epidemics which kill millions, like AIDS.

A higher level of caution with unknown new threats, whose full possible level of harm is not understood, is rational and appropriate.

> but we will hear about people sufferring from thyroid cancer 20 years after Chernobyl until the end of time.

You can afford to be snarky when you didn't see a 8-year old died of leukemia because of Chernobyl. I don't care if HN bans me or anything, but as someone how has known and befriended such a kid, I tell you this: fuck you. Children dying of leukemia because of radiation is worst than hell on earth (not that I'm a spiritual person anyway).

And just FYI, my brother lives close to a hydroelectric plant that were it to collapse then he would be dead in maximum 10-15 minutes (this is the plant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidraru_Dam). My father's uncle (after whom I'm named), who was a technician at that dam, actually died while working there (a control room got flooded before he could escape from it). But it doesn't matter, I would still choose hydro over nuclear, because it just feels right.

What if the 8year old kid died of heavy metal poisoning because we stripped mined his water supply for coal? Or he lived downstream from an oil sands fracking plant?

Or he lived in Bangladesh and global warming caused his land to flood.

Or he live din Africa and starved because we pay more for corn to make biofuel than he can afford.

Or he lived in the middle east on top of our oil and we had to drop some laser guided democracy on him?

> But it doesn't matter, I would still choose hydro over nuclear, because it just feels right.

Why would you admit this?

I know that was simply an emotional response and I don't want to take anything away from the child who died, but to point to a specific child and say that they died because of Chernobyl is no more logical than to look at the snow on the ground outside and declare that Global Warming is a hoax.

I really doubt anyone ever claimed the disaster at Bangiao was just an unfortunate incident.

Who doesn't bash China for their blatant disregard of human life?

Not that I disagree with your point.

If Itaipu [1] bursts, it's said that it would flood and destroy a large part of Argentina. In the past, argentinians were worried that it could be used as a weapon against them.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itaipu_Dam

Why do you think the source looks good? It's from a nuclear lobby site.

The referenced data lists 0.04-0.23 deaths per TWh for coal fuel chain and 0.01-0.65.

The number 160 deaths/TWh for is made up from very rough estimates of WHO that 1 mio. people die due to coal air pollution. That's hardly a 'good source', IMHO.

Further, the effect of storing lethally radioactive material for very long time periods is completely neglected.

If you run a full analysis large scale wind farms are the safest form of power generation. The problem with a simplistic analysis is most wind deaths are upfront and most wind power generation is vary new. Build 1TW of just about anything and you see construction related deaths the first year. However, after you build the thing deaths related to the fuel used and the difficulty servicing and decommissioning the power plant start to dominate.

PS: Arguably dam's save lives by reducing flooding and change the landscape over a large area so it's hard to calculate deaths from Hydro power.

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