Hacker News Reader

> Picture a few large cities with contractors running around every roof tending to solar panels and compare to a few experts at a single nuclear power plant. For the contractors-on-roofs, the slip & falls add up even though they'll never get an HBO mini-series.

This is a very flawed and short-sighted argument. Averages don't matter when you are talking about fat-tailed/power law risk distributions. Nobody would be opposed to PVs on roofs in their neighborhood b/c some construction workers fall to death every year - this risk is well calculable. But (almost) everyone would be opposed to a fission plant or nuclear waste facility next door - and rightfully so.

Without enormous direct and indirect subsidies, nuclear (fission) isnt commercially viable anywhere in the world. Heck, you still can't insure a fission plant.

Yes, in theory fission would have been the best option for carbon-free energy. No, in practice humanity never figured out how to safely and efficiently use this power source and now renewables are a way safer and cheaper bet. You won't find any objective economic analysis (that incorporates such indirect subsidies as the implicit state guarantee and realistic building and waste handling/storing costs) that can show otherwise.

Averages don't matter when you are talking about fat-tailed/power law risk distributions. Nobody would be opposed to PVs on roofs in their neighborhood b/c some construction workers fall to death every year - this risk is well calculable. But (almost) everyone would be opposed to a fission plant or nuclear waste facility next door - and rightfully so.

How is this even an argument.

Nuclear risks are also calculable. The regulatory hurdles nuclear has to go trough, even for testing reactors, to meet risk criteria (among others), are enormous. The vast majority of nuclear, as exposed by deaths/TWh generated, is extremely safe. Flying vs driving argument.

Take the worst nuclear catastrophe. Take the wildest overestimation in deaths. It's still less than most other sources, including renewables.

No, in practice humanity never figured out how to safely and efficiently use this power source

What? France. All their active residues probably fit in one or two football fields. 3th/4th Gen will consume them, making medical radioisotopes in the process. You can't contain megatons of CO2 this easily.

In the meantime, air pollution kills in the range of 6-8 million people a year. German support for keeping nuclear grows

https://twitter.com/hh_mikawe/status/1284770806090825728?s=2...

> But (almost) everyone would be opposed to a fission plant or nuclear waste facility next door - and rightfully so.

Reading this kind of debate from France is a good laugh.

If you're interested you can check where our electricity comes from here: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit... (between 60 and 70 percent of nuclear energy today).

France exported and imported a vast amounts of electricity during it’s nuclear hay day and still needed huge subsidies. In effect they where little different than people living near a local nuclear reactor getting most of their power from it while extremely dependent on the wider electric grid to meet demand and lower overall prices. Which as odd as it sounds demonstrated civilian nuclear inability to scale as they still needed to reduce power plant utilization by ~10%.

And then check out the cost overruns on Flamanville 3. What is now, 4x the initial cost promise? Or is it 6x?

New nuclear is dead in France just like it is in the US.

Also see electricitymap.org

Because France was desperate to have its own nuclear weapons.

It was not economic for them either (tho back in the day it displaced coal - try having a coal plant next door)

France's nuclear power program actually displaced oil. France had a lot of oil fired electric power plants in the 1960s when it was a cheap fuel. As a reaction to the oil price shocks of the 1970s, France committed to the "Messmer Plan" for nuclear electricity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...

France demonstrated its first fission bomb in 1960 and its first thermonuclear bomb in 1968:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_and_weapons_of_mass_des...

The 1970s and 1980s build up of nuclear power in France had nothing to do with desperation to have its own nuclear weapons. France already had them before the Messmer Plan.

"France's nuclear power program actually displaced oil"

No. Oil is much cheaper

To maintain a nuclear arsenal a nuclear industry is needed.

It is the only economic justification for nuclear power

So you don't think something can be expensive because it is heavily regulated? Or do you just think it is not possible with less regulation?

What is the point of bringing up economics when we are talking about life and death? How can you even measure if something is economic or not if you haven't defined what a human life is worth?

What makes you think nuclear power has a power law risk distribution? For that to be true, it'd have to be possible for an unboundedly large nuclear accident..

Just because something has more concentrated risk doesn't make it fat tail. Nuclear power's winning safety record already includes Chernobyl and Fukushima.

I agree that costs are a major problem with nuclear. It seems to be a problem with all large scale construction projects in the past 20-30 years or so.

On the safety tail risks, IMO it's more of a psychological/perception problem than a problem of actual risk. We've had a number of serious accidents in the history of nuclear power, and none of them have led to anything close to the death toll of a single year of running coal plants.

The problem is actually that people are forced off of their homes, personal property and way if life should there be a big accident. For an average householder it's their life savings, friendships, community and way of life wiped out through no fault of theirs. Sure there'll be compensation and resettlement but who trusts governments to do this fairly and painlessly?

It hasn't helped that no civilian nuclear operator has demonstrated the ability to sustain safe operations with zero incidents and consistently prioritize safety over the course of decades. Every operator has a string of nuclear incidents of varying severity and i think more than anything, the Fukushima thing shook people up because while you could excuse away Russian and American accidents with cultural factors nobody perceives Japanese to be careless or irresponsible (and this was expressly the reasoning that led Angela Merkel to reverse her stance)

So yeah in abstract at a nation level, it's not a major risk but for the families possibly affected, it's a catastrophe - as opposed to increased chance of a few people getting cancer over their lifetime from Coal.

Therefore given the asymmetric risk and demonstrated inability of the nuclear industry in ensuring zero incidents, there's naturally grassroots opposition which translates into political pressure that no amount of "risk is so low" data-flashing can wave away.

> and this was expressly the reasoning that led Angela Merkel to reverse her stance

I know a lot of Germans who think that reversal was just opportunistic pandering to environmentalists to grab votes from the Green party.

Renewables are only safer and cheaper bet once the battery issue is solved and can be made equally green, safe and cheap. The primary reason why nuclear isn't commercial viable today is that combining natural gas and renewables makes for a very cheap energy grid.

There is no "battery issue". There are lots of energy storage mechanisms that work well in combination. [0]

What you said is a tautology and brought nothing new to the table. (non cheap) nuclear can't compete against cheap renewables. Everyone knows that but almost nobody knows why nuclear is so expensive today.

The reason why nuclear power is not commercially viable is that it doesn't benefit from economies of scale. If you build custom tailored humongous monolithic nuclear plants you're going to pay a huge amount of money. Just think about how expensive it would be to build one giant solar panel with a total area of 1 km² instead of a million 1m² panels. It's absolutely nonsensical yet it happens every single time a nuclear plant is being constructed. The few success stories like France simply standardized on a single design. General corruption and budget bloat probably did more to stop nuclear than all anti nuclear hipsters combined.

[0] https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/09/correcting-anti-renewab...

Nope.

There are other alternatives, and grid scale batteries are viable now. Just cheaper to burn gas/coal and fsck the future!

The obvious alternative is pumped hydro, that is well established. Another is demand management, unexplored because the greed heads in control do not believe that our society can work together for the common good.

Coming from Aotearoa, as I do, I know that is a fat lie.

Currently there does not exist a commercial viable pumped hydro installation in the world that buy overcapacity renewable energy and later sells it at a profit. There are a few experimental and proof of concept installations that demonstrate the possibility of hydro as a battery, and at least one operate as an additional reservoir to a hydro dam, but the commercial viability of buying cheap renewable energy to pump water in order to generate electricity later when the price is high is not yet here.

Demand management is also a great idea in concept but the commercial viability is questionable as long as people can just turn on the cheap gas burners. Commercially, turning off production and keep the industry closed when renewable are not producing is much more expensive compared to just paying what ever price society currently demands when burning fossil fuels.

Remove fossil fuels from being viable choice in the energy grid and the economic viability would change dramatically for every other energy source, including hydro pumps and nuclear. Demand management might even become a possible strategy to a point where it can have an significant impact on the energy grid. For now most grids operates by combining cheap renewable with cheap fossil fuels, with the environment taking the real cost when the fossil fuels burns.

Another alternative is to just build so many renewable energy plants that demand can be served even when production is comparatively low. During peak production hours, you can just blow the energy back into the atmosphere (or run a steel mill with it). This is a question of political will, and nothing more.

I have seen Aoraki with my own eyes, and I understand what you seek to protect.

For the locals Aoraki is a literal ancestor.

So it is not my job, it is taken care of.

I suppose I was unclear. Please forgive me. We need to protect the idea of preservation in culture and society, so that future people also hold these ideals of caretaking and awareness of our ancestors, including the planet and life itself, to be true.

Hydroelectric projects also cause an increase in mercury levels specifically methylmercury. You'd think hydroelectric would be a safe method of generating power with flooding being the only bad effect. An Inuk guy in Labrador I follow on Twitter (@AndersenAngus) is trying to raise awareness about methylmercury due to flooding of land for hydroelectric dams.

Here is some info on it via the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2016/11/human-health-risks...

"Microbes convert naturally occurring mercury in soils into potent methylmercury when land is flooded, such as when dams are built for hydroelectric projects. The methylmercury moves into the water and animals, magnifying as it moves up the food chain. This makes the toxin especially dangerous for indigenous communities living near hydroelectric projects because they tend to have diets rich in local fish, birds and marine mammals such as seals. "

We are just so bad grasping the entire chain of effects of our actions, and the environment is incredibly complex. We need massive automated testing of environmental impact; systems that surveil ground, air, biodiversity over time all around the globe and particularly near projects like dams. It's no longer possible to just shrug it off, hope the planet can tolerate it and subconsciously accept some human loss in the name of progress.

> Picture a few large cities with contractors running around every roof tending to solar panels and compare to a few experts at a single nuclear power plant. For the contractors-on-roofs, the slip & falls add up even though they'll never get an HBO mini-series.

Most solar power will not be distributed power, but large-scale solar power plants. All large-scale solar power plants I've read about are on the ground, which makes sense since, unlike with wind power, increasing the height of the panels on a solar power plant gains nothing.

It gains the space underneath. Flat roofs (of large commercial buildings, for instance) sound like a good place for them. I don't understand why they are put on the ground instead so often.

Most people live in cities where land is very expensive, but rural land is cheap. So, it makes sense to do large-scale solar projects that aren't near cities at ground level, and put solar panels on roofs in cities and towns where the power is being used on-site and land is expensive.

If people are putting installing solar panels at ground level in expensive urban settings, then yeah I think that's pretty weird. (It might be an artifact of land use planning rules in some towns where people put solar panels in places where they aren't allowed to put buildings or parking lots, for whatever reason.)

In my country (the Netherlands), there are a lot of huge distribution centers, large warehouses with flat roofs. But instead of putting solar on the roofs of those, rural land is used, and we don't have so much of that. It's a shame.

Hopefully more shared use becomes a thing. Stick the panels a bit higher, space them out a bit more. No reason why you can't have a mix of livestock and solar panels on one piece of land. Raises the price a bit for now, but everyone wins I guess?

Because it's difficult to install them at scale like that. For example, if you want to do a big solar project, you have to negotiate with the owner of every building you want to put panels on, you have to find a place in every building for inverters, you have to install metering, you may have to upgrade the grid to handle the extra power going out, then you have to have an account and customer service and payments for every building, and if the panels need to be maintained, you have to schedule a time and send out a crew.

Then you also can't practically do certain things like install trackers, because they break more often and it's too expensive to maintain them if you have to have a crew go out there instead of your on-site maintenance people just go over to the broken tracker/panel.

Overall the costs of rooftop solar are just more expensive than a central solar farm. Plus, you can site the solar farm where there is better sunlight and land is cheap.

Ultimately this is the problem I have with solar: It puts an effective cap on our energy use. Solar will never be more than 100% efficient, and there is only so much land that it is reasonable to use, so if we say, wanted to expand our worldwide energy usage 10x, it's not really feasible.

> Ultimately this is the problem I have with solar: It puts an effective cap on our energy use. Solar will never be more than 100% efficient, and there is only so much land that it is reasonable to use, so if we say, wanted to expand our worldwide energy usage 10x, it's not really feasible.

Isn't this exactly why we should be installing solar on rooftops. It might be more exensive, but it's a bettet use of space. Plus most of the extra cost is labour, and aren't we constantly worrying about how their aren't enough jobs. Seems like a win-win to me.

It does not out any kind of cao on our energy usage, the amount of land that needs to be covered in solar panels to supply a country is a tiny percentage of it's area, and is basically a rounding error.

The limiting factor is cost of instalation and eqioment, not land. Additionally there are mnay deserts which are totally uninhabbited and uninhabbitable.

Yeah, I keep coming back to this "$1 billion idea" of building a solar plant on big shed roofs. Quite literally buy a reasonable sized property in the country(with/near rail) and cover it in sheds.

Once the solar energy output is established then the shed can be used for productive work. Preferably with some level of energy storage but a lot of productive sheds don't need much overnight electricity.

Sounds like a pretty good idea. You could run it as effectively two separate business, one is a power utility and the other rents storage or workshop space.

> increasing the height of the panels on a solar power plant gains nothing

Well, not nothing, since less atmosphere means less energy dissipated before light hits the panels, but certainly it’s a better tradeoff cost-wise to keep them low.

Hydro also directly saves lives by reducing flooding and indirectly via clean water. On net world wide hydroelectric dams have saved more lives directly than they have cost from dam failures. Which is unique among all energy sources. For context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_floods

As to nuclear, it’s horribly expensive when you try to scale it. France was regularly exporting and importing vast amounts of electricity to other countries and their power plant utilization was still 10% below the US etc. That directly equated to significantly higher prices.

> solar/wind have trouble beating nuclear on metrics like death/watt because you need lots of infrastructure per watt.

Really, this makes me think one thing, jobs. We can take steps to make jobs safer, but if solar/wind get even close to nuclear but employ a lot more people, then that's a huge gain overall.

Reducing personnel costs is a gain for a company's bottom line. Increasing personnel costs is good for society, as it means either more employed or higher wages (assuming it's not higher wages that somehow results in fewer people). Decreasing company/product costs with a new technology that also does so while employing significantly more people is a huge win for everyone (except those that refused to diversify from the old technology).

Edit: whoops s/jobs cheaper/jobs safer/

>Increasing personnel costs is good for society

This is your brain on capitalism. :p

More seriously: more jobs, more human effort, more accidents and injuries and death, less free time... this is objectively a bad thing. It's only from the lens of the current economic system that it becomes a positive thing, which speaks volumes in itself.

Well, part of the problem is that I said "we can take steps to make jobs cheaper" when I meant "we can take steps to make jobs safer".

We keep automating away jobs. People want/need work, mostly for money, but also because want to feel they are doing something and part of something. So I don't take it as a given that less free time and more human effort is objectively a bad thing. It really depends on the person and whether they feel a sense of accomplishment in their work.

As for death and accidents, that's somewhat addressed by my typo fix.

> It's only from the lens of the current economic system that it becomes a positive thing, which speaks volumes in itself.

The thing about the current economic system is that it's the current economic system. It can change, in small ways and big ways, but I'm not not sure it will (even if we're probably in the absolute best time to try out UBI we'll see in our lifetimes, and it will be a shame if/when it passes us by in that respect, even if it means life is much better overall).

Hydro's main problem is that it's just not available in most countries / areas.

Solar's main problem is that it's not reliable everywhere. Try setting up solar in Chengdu and you'll find that there's just not enough cloud free days in the year to make it worthwhile.

We need baseline power and renewables are not usually enough. If you're lucky enough to have a river or sunny climate then great, but that's not possible in some places.

Is it windy?

In Chengdu? No wind on most days, which is (in part) why the fog / smog blocks out the sun almost every day of the year.

> olar/wind have trouble beating nuclear on metrics like death/watt because you need lots of infrastructure per watt.

There were some studies claiming nuclear has lower deaths/kWh, but as I recall they (1) used old numbers for wind that do not reflect current safety figures, (2) assumed solar was rooftop instead of utility-scale which is now dominating installations (because it is so much cheaper), and (3) ignored deaths from uranium mining, which is where most of the release of radioactive material is in the fuel cycle.

>For the contractors-on-roofs, the slip & falls add up even though they'll never get an HBO mini-series.

Are solar roofs significantly more dangerous to work on than a normal roof for some reason? Roofs are going up whether they have panels or not.

South Fork was never a hydroelectric dam. It was an earthen dam meant to create a lake for the robber barons of the day.

And it was fine, until said robber barons decided not to maintain the dam.

> "solar/wind have trouble beating nuclear on metrics like death/watt because you need lots of infrastructure per watt."

That may be so. But solar and wind are clear winners when it comes to cost/watt, and that's what determines which gets built.

If the energy source is not providing energy when i need it, i dont care that its cheap at some other time when its of no use to me.

Safety is not a real problema in rebewavles, they are much safe than mining/ fossil fuels of any kind.

Nuclear is the safest energy source in terms of deaths per terawatt hour [1]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#:~:text=....