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Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

washingtonpost.com

167 pointslukeqsee248 comments

When I see a story like this, it reminds me that the events in Japan represent the biggest PR challenge the nuclear industry has faced in many years. Fifty billion dollars of nuclear reactor US taxpayer-backed loan guarantees hang in the balance.

The industry has been working for the past few decades to rehabilitate the image of nuclear power after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and now they have to contend with videos of a 1/2 mile tall mushroom cloud over a Japanese reactor and the continuing press coverage. Talk about challenging.

I think the HN community may have difficulty appreciating the challenges of nuclear reactor design because it is so different from software. In software, you have known bugs and unknown bugs. Once you've got the known bugs down to a low enough level and aren't finding too many new ones, you might release. The consequences of a bug is generally not too bad, certainly not on the order of making 800 square miles of real estate worthless, for example.

In engineering a nuclear plant, you have 90 tons of nuclear fuel generating 3,000,000,000 J of heat every second. The only reason it doesn't immediately turn into a big bubbling blob of molten uranium is that pumps the size of SUVs are pumping water over the fuel and removing all that heat. Every nuclear plant in the world is one minute from 90 tons of fuel melting into the basement if the water flow stops and fall-back systems fail. Fortunately, the engineering on these plants is done extremely carefully, with multiple independent systems in place to prevent exactly this by halting the nuclear chain reactions with neutron absorbing rods as well as by ensuring the flow of cooling water.

However, the events in Japan exposed an "unknown bug" in the design, that if you flood the basements of the plants with water you can lose backup power and coolant flow. While this particular "bug" is relatively easy to correct, it is a reminder that other unknown bugs may exist waiting to be exposed by other unexpected sets of circumstances.

It is good to remember Richard Feynman's quote about the space shuttle Challenger disaster, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

Number of casualties from nuclear plant accidents: a few thousands.

Number of casualties from coal mining accidents this past century [2]: 100,000.

That's accidents in coal mines alone, not even counting lung diseases and similar.

The fact that it takes a 9.0 tsunami after forty years of complete absence of nuclear accidents to bring this to the front page should be indication enough that nuclear is not just safer than most of the other energy production techniques, it's also the one that has the highest energy rendering.

Any Green voter who's done their homework should be voting for more energy to be generated by nuclear plants, not less.

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

"Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new book from the New York Academy of Sciences published today on the 24th anniversary of the meltdown at the Soviet facility."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/26

Excerpts of the book here:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.2009.1181.is...

full book:

Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment: (PDF; 4,3 MB) http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the_...

"forty years of complete absence of nuclear accidents"? The same Wikipedia has a fairly large section on accidents at nuclear power plants, stating "worldwide there have been 99 accidents at nuclear power plants from 1952 to 2009 (defined as incidents that either resulted in the loss of human life or more than US$50,000 of property damage, the amount the US federal government uses to define major energy accidents that must be reported), totaling US$20.5 billion in property damages.[4] Fifty-seven accidents have occurred since the Chernobyl disaster, and almost two-thirds (56 out of 99) of all nuclear-related accidents have occurred in the USA." On a brighter note however, "There have been comparatively few fatalities associated with nuclear power plant accidents"

I vote for neither.

What would you suggest? Keeping in mind that basically all renewable sources sans hydroelectric can't be used to provide baseload power and hydroelectric power both has very few potential locations (most of which are in use) and has the nasty failure condition of washing away a good portion of the countryside.

So, if all you know is hydro-electric, why not use it NOW?

Germany is building two large underwater power lines in the latest HVDC technology to Norway.

One is described here:

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

NorGer is one, NORD.LINK the other.

These power lines will link Germany with Hydro electric power in Norway.

Essentially technology like that will provide the base load for the huge offshore wind farms that Germany will build in the coming decades in the North Sea.

Alpha Ventus http://www.alpha-ventus.de/ is the first one of those. These are really far away from the coast and sitting in the North Sea exposed to the most severe weather conditions.

It is just that a country needs to have a plan and a will to do it.

You can imagine that the nuclear lobby does not like this project to get hydro-electric power from Norway at all. They are doing everything to delay it. Corrupt politicians like those from the FDP (Brüderle) are their puppets.

Actually there are more alternatives and base load is not the same all the time. If you have a large grid distributing wind generated electricity from a large area, that provides part of the base load for most of the days of the year.

Solar thermal with molten salt heat storage might be a viable baseload alternative.

It still has the same problem that you can't "turn them up" to cope with higher demand over longish periods, which makes dealing with them tricky. They are a good step though.

As someone who lives in a country where half the year it's -10℃ with 2 hours of sunlight (zero hours if it's cloudy), I'd have to say it's not quite viable.

Most of the world's population is in more sunny areas.

I know it's easy to suggest as a New Zealander (lots of mountains, lots of rain, and not that many people), but that hydro you mention is ace, wish all our power came from it.

Dams aren't impervious to killing lots of people either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

2 incidents in 15 years: 175,000+ killed. Plus they emit methane in huge quantities (from the decay of plant materiel in the reservoir)

I would bet that for New Zealand the best form of energy would be geothermal even though the long-term effect studies around cooling the earth's crust are lacking.

Your Wikipedia article also says that in China, 1000 times more people die while mining (per "coal unit") than in the US (China produces twice the coal of the US, 6000 deaths/year in China va 28/year US). So throwing numbers around like you do is dishonest. 28 deaths is still too many, but it is a big difference to the sob story you present.

You guys keep amazing me. Do you forget that nuclear plants produce tons of waste that has to be kept far away from any life form for thousands of years ? Do you know any written language or sign or whatever that is 10'000 years old and which human people can understand and use cautiously ?

Nuclear waste is going to be the worst legacy we give to our children and grandchildren. They will hate us for this.

And, even if the waste is going to give trouble (and to cost) people in the future, these same people handling our radioactive waste won't have any fuel left:

Toxic waste is forever, fuel is for 50 years. Doesn't that look dumb to you ?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Fuel_composit...

Follow the link in the Wikipedia page to the article on reprocessing. It solves both of the issues you raise: it greatly extends the time the fuel lasts, and it greatly shortens the time that the remaining waste is dangerous. The only reason this was even an issue in the US (it isn't in other nuclear-using countries) is that the Carter administration banned reprocessing because of misplaced concerns about proliferation. In March 1999 the Clinton administration finally reversed that position (probably because it was obvious by then that reprocessing didn't increase proliferation risk--every other nuclear-using country has reprocessed its fuel from the beginning and there have been no incidents). So we can just take all the stuff that was supposed to be stored in Yucca Mountain for 10,000 years and reprocess it instead. Problem solved.

I don't believe reprocessing means "no waste" but anyway, that's just half of the problem: what will we do in 50 years ?

And how do you reprocess the lives of the 200'000 people who had to leave after the nuclear accident in Tchernobyl alone ? Tell the fishermen by Fukushima to go reprocess their lives because some over-confident engineers thought they mastered what they were doing.

Nuclear power is just like the "green revolution": pure megalomania by people too afraid to consider alternatives like... a less power greedy way of living.

I didn't mean to imply that reprocessing meant no waste: it means a lot less waste, that needs to be stored safely for a much shorter time. Also, since it allows you to use the fuel much more efficiently (without reprocessing, only a couple of percent of the usable fuel actually gets used; the rest ends up mixed in with the waste and is just stored without being used), it does solve the 50 year problem as well.

That said, I also didn't mean to say that we shouldn't consider all the impacts of nuclear power. But, as many others in this thread have commented, to be fair we should also consider all the impacts of other power sources as well.

As for a less power greedy way of living, I'm all for it, as long as I don't have to give up actual functionality. I'm all for having more efficient cars, but I'm not going to give up having a car; the freedom it gives me is too valuable to give up. (And no, living somewhere where I don't need a car to have that freedom is not an option. Been there, done that, prefer not to. Not everyone wants to live in that kind of environment.)

Doesn't uranium get mined? How safe is that?

It takes a few orders of magnitude less ore to power a nuclear plant for X time periods than it takes to power a coal plant. Even if they're equivalent in danger, you're still comparing whales and minnows.

One thing that blows my mind with the Fukushima plant (and presumably others) is that the spent fuel pond is seemingly built above ground. Wouldn't you want this to be at the very bottom of the reactor building, so that water could collect in it in an emergency situation like in Fukushima where water is pumped in from above? Maybe this is (was) one of the unknowns/unthoughtofs that you mention.

As an aside, if no one's seen the excellent Battle for Chernobyl, I highly recommend it. It details the insane clean-up operation that took place after the Chernobyl disaster. It's on Google Video.

The plant is built like that so spent fuel can be lifted out of the reactor and placed directly in the pool using one crane. A more secure spent-fuel pool would have required more elaborate fuel handling, thus a more expensive design.

Also, when these plants were built I don't think they anticipated the spent-fuel pools would become long-term storage. There was the assumption that centralized nuclear waste disposal sites would be built and the pools would only store waste until it was safe to transfer.

This is often the case, a plan for the removal of waste to a disposal site is promised, and then once the plant is built, and the contractors have been paid, nothing happens. New plants are then built, it is said that a disposal plan will be put into effect, and still these plans never materialize.

Putting the fuel storage pool on the fifth floor of the reactor does seem questionable, especially given the violence of the explosion at reactor 3.

Another "unknown bug" exposed by these events will probably motivate mitigating the risk of hydrogen explosions from hydrogen generated in a partial meltdown. As you can see in the second picture in this link,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2399676

the force of the explosion crushed the concrete structure of the adjacent reactor building, and launched enough material into the air that it created holes 60 feet in diameter in the roof of the turbine building when it came down. This was not anticipated; if it were the reactors would have been constructed further apart.

The spent fuel rods must be actively cooled for many months after they are removed from the reactor due to heat-generating radioactive daughter products. Since the pools holding them have either boiled away due to the absence of active cooling or drained into the basement due to damage, it is likely these rods overheated. Japanese authorities have mentioned the possibility of "re-criticality", which would be a bad thing, especially in a fuel pond with no containment whatsoever.

There will probably be many lessons gained from these events that will be used to reduce risks in other operating reactors and future designs.

Link to video mentioned above http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv3a4LXi_qc

Out if interest, the way I'd try and design a fail-safe solution would be to have meltdown trigger a shutdown.

Picture a bunch of large, heat-proof (ceramic?) test-tubes, with their bases apart but their openings together.

Put that underneath the core - then if it melts and drops down, small pieces of it flow in different directions - until you've got a sub-critical amount in each one - so the fission reaction stops.

Anything which requires active prevention of fission seems odd, presumably passive is better?

I would have a look at pebble bed reactors, molten salt reactors and heavy water moderated reactors.

long story short, the designs exist, we just can't seem to get rid of the old ones that are currently built and we can't seem to get the new designs built in any sort of scale.

The R&D costs for those are HUGE, as they are unproven, the countries like mine (Uruguay) that are looking into building new power plants don't want that, we want proven designs.

The issue at Fukushima isn't criticality, though. All the reactors were safely shut down seconds after the earthquake hit, and no new fission has occurred since then.

The problem is that even a shut-down reactor core generates significant heat due to the decay of fission by-products, and that's what caused the problems.

That said, there are other reactor designs which are more inherently safe.

> The problem is that even a shut-down reactor core generates significant heat due to the decay of fission by-products

Ah, thanks. I hadn't appreciated that.

The way I'd try and design a fail-safe solution would be not to design it in the first place. No one is forcing us to build these things. But government contracts are lucrative and contractors exist.

No one is forcing you. A lot of people just think refrigeration is awfully nice to have.

We will all be called to account for every careless word we have spoken.

There are a lot of parallels with airliner design. From reading articles about the nuke plant design, I think they could learn a lot from aviation engineers about how to build safe systems.

I'm sure they know how to build safe systems. But equally important is whether they'll spend the money necessary to make them safe, or if they'll sacrifice safety in the name of profit.

So, how is nuclear fuel transported from wherever is it manufactured to the reactor? Why cant that process be implemented to transfer the fuel out of the reactor?

If memory serves, the problem is that it is politically impossible to create some area to place the waste fuel. ie. it would be much safer to move the spent fuel out of the reactor, however there is nowhere for it to go to.

I am talking about taking it out of the damaged reactor and into a sound containment/cooling unit.

That is far better politically than letting it sit in a damaged structure leaking radiation everywhere.

Sometimes nations need to STFU about politics and get shit done.

Great.

I can't drink milk, had to avoid water for a day or two, having problem finding relatively uncontaminated meat, 20 km or so of this country is probably going to be left unlivable and so on.

I find it incredibly offensive to see the Americans on this board downplaying the damage from Fukushima. Mod me down all you want. I will be happy to pay attention when someone purchases land at a fair price near Fukushima #2 and raises his children there.

Until then, you are handwaving for industry or for some vision of "environmentally friendly power". Put money on the table, or frankly, your opinion is worthless.

We need nuclear power. Unfortunately, the culture of misinformation and understating danger around nuclear power means it is going to be impossible for it to supply the majority of our power. What this means in terms of loss of quality of life is not lost on me.

You've drank milk and eaten meat contaminated by poisonous chemicals from coal power plants for your whole life. Not a single person has died yet from the Fukushima disaster, yet millions of people have died from ailments caused by coal power plants. Why is that kind of contamination just fine?

I find it incredibly offensive to see the Americans on this board downplaying the damage from Fukushima.

Perhaps we should first stop downplaying the damage from every single coal power plant in the world, particularly those in China and other developing nations with minimal pollution controls, where there are millions of people suffering from pollution-related illnesses?

why to promote that false dichotomy - either nuclear or coal. There are other options, better nuclear designs, natural gas, wind [ which is baseline type of energy if towers are high enough ], solar - we have so much desert on Earth, and start seriously develop nuclear fusion [ as its development has been practically stopped for the fear of proliferation ]

>better nuclear designs

Nobody is advocating that we build more 4 decade old reactors. On the other hand there are plenty of people suggesting that we not build new reactors. We aren't seeing an attack on old reactor designs, we're seeing an attack on the "other option" you listed.

>Nobody is advocating that we build more 4 decade old reactors.

the real political and economical power is with the current nuclear industry which doesn't have other designs. Any permit to build if given in the next 10 years would result in a new old nuclear plant. Like any powerful established industry they protect their position with heavy regulations and wouldn't let any innovative outsiders in.

There are plenty of other designs, most of which get built as test plants, work nicely then never get built again due to political pressure to stick to "safe" designs.

Yeah, but they are lobbying to we allow industry to build new plants without a fundamental and transparent rethinking of the safety issues, and with various proposed schemes to limit or eliminate corporate liability. (Is that really the best way to ensure safe designs and operation procedures?)

The reactor designs are newer, but we also need newer designs for management and disaster prevention/response. Even with the crappy obsolete Fukishima reactors, we would have come through this event fine had there been a (much) bigger investment in those non-technological areas when the plant was built and over the decades since then.

Um, the root cause of the problems at Fukushima had nothing to do with the design of the reactors. The root cause was that their backup diesel generators, which were to supply power to the reactor control and safety systems in the event of a shutdown, along with their switchgear, were sited behind a seawall that got overcome by the tsunami. If the backup generators had been sited properly, this whole fiasco would never have gotten started; the reactors would have shut down safely, end of story. I'm actually amazed that the reactors have held up as well as they have in the face of having no cooling water over a significant part of the fuel rods for this long.

> develop nuclear fusion [ as its development has been practically stopped for the fear of proliferation ]

Wait ... what? Are you saying that nuclear fusion (and not fission) poses some kind of proliferation risk? Proliferation of what, exactly? Advanced lasers? Powerful magnets? Hydrogen? Deuterium?? Tritium??? Helium????

Or are there some reasons to worry that the neutron flux from the reaction would be used to activate or otherwise enrich something dangerous that I don't know about?

>Advanced lasers? Powerful magnets?

this 2, laser driven inertial confinement and tokamak, don't pose a significant proliferation risk even/when they are successful. Unfortunately this 2 is also least promising as the decades of experiments have clearly shown. As a result, there is no rush of investments into them.

The proliferation risk is creation of relatively compact, say, in the first generation, up to transport container size fusion device. Creation and maintenance of such a weapon wouldn't be possible to control as there is no radiation, no uranium mining/buying, no massive enrichment facilities, no breeder reactors,... nothing to control. Basically a nightmare for modern international politics.

At the end of 199x the government analysis shown that the fusion wouldn't be cheaper than 4c/kwt of coal power and it would pose the significant proliferation risks if developed and miniaturized into the deliverable device. Thus we have such a dismal investment and progress. Do you pay attention to Sandia?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2266841

I have a hard time believing that a fusion power source would work at all like a fusion bomb. Quite the opposite: one needs to keep the reaction under control, so keeping it small makes things easier. I suppose, in theory, it's possible, but I doubt it.

If you have a citation for where Sandia says there are proliferation risks, I would be interested.

it isn't a yield (like shock/heat wave, etc...) that is the primary purpose of neutron weapons. The neutron flux is what they are created for. Just for example - the neutron weapons deployed in Europe several decades ago were of very low yield, as low as it is possible with fissile-fusion weapon - their purpose was to stop Soviet Union tanks as intense neutron flux passes easily through the armor, yet is absorbed nicely by humans as we're 80% water.

>I have a hard time believing that a fusion power source would work at all like a fusion bomb.

No need to. The only thing what matters is the amount of neutrons generated. High intensity flux during 10-30sec. instead of super-high during 0.001ms explosion would do the same damage if the total amount of neutrons generated is the same.

I mentioned Sandia because what they do (more precisely what they did 10 years ago) was the most effective and promising way to get effective fusion - for energy generation as well as to weaponize it without fission part, and i think it is illustrative to look at them to see how progress has stalled (more precisely it was redirected from advancing of the engineering of the fusion into more plasma research) when it became that clear.

So you're saying it would be used to make a neutron bomb? Interesting.

I do understand that practical fusion requires neutron flux, but I didn't think we had achieved any significant amount of fusion capable of producing such a flux.

fusion development hasn't been stopped, especially not for fear of proliferation.

Do you have any information about this subject that I do not?

Also, the major problem with putting solar power plants in deserts is that you lose most of your power trying to get it somewhere useful. Expect this to change when we have commercially viable room temperature (ish) superconductors.

Another problem with desert solar power plants is political - Europe for instance would become dependant on the middle east and africa for power, which after the past couple decades of oil politics doesn't look like a very attractive option.

Of course nuclear isn't much better in this regard - while we do have uranium deposits, we don't have any uranium mines, and hence rely on imports for nuclear fuel.

On the other hand, you can always use thorium deposits, use nuclear waste from other nations as fuel, pull uranium from seawater, etc.

>fusion development hasn't been stopped, especially not for fear of proliferation.

>Do you have any information about this subject that I do not?

do you have any information about fusion development being really seriously continued? It isn't proliferation risk alone that affects the development. It is also about projected cost of the produced energy. Any such facilities would be extremely expensive, typical nuclear plant expensive, and it doesn't look like it will have energy density higher than current nuclear plants as both are limited by the same factors, like cooling system engineering that transfers the energy from core to turbines. Thus the price of fusion energy may theoretically be cheaper than the price of fission energy only by the cost of uranium itself. Permits, regulatory approval process, etc... will not be cheaper. Such cost projections, together with the proliferation risk are the reasons that there is no meaningful development of fusion today.

With high voltage directed current lines, losses are around 3%/1000km. That's not so much.

Interesting, do you have any links as to how they work/how they are constructed/etc?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

Because while it is a false dichotomy, people's reaction to both are real and extremely unbalanced. We're used to coal, so people don't fear it as much as we should. We hear "nuclear" and get cold war propaganda popping up in our heads.

If he was drinking contaminated milk from coal power plants, then he is still alive.

Surprise, coal power plants have filters now...

Surprise 2, coal is also not the energy of the future...

I was kind of floored by the figure cited in the article of 6000 deaths per year in china from mining alone.

Do you think coal mining is more dangerous than Uranium mining?

As a quick bit of thought.

Lets say that you need to mine, say 2,715,384x the amount of coal to produce the same amount of energy as you would uranium. (From https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Energy_densit...).

Now if mining uranium is less then 2,000,000x more dangerous as mining coal, then per unit of energy generated it is actually safer.

Hence yes, I do think that coal mining is more dangerous then uranium mining, per unit of energy generated.

Wrong.

How much percent of Uranium is in ore? How fast is that going down in the next century?

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

Ever wondered why Europe has coal mines but closed all uranium mines? Just for fun?

Uranium mines now happen to be in remote areas or developing countries.

Uranium mines are a cluster fuck of all kinds of environmental problems.

Germany closed one. It cost billions to contain the damage.

France with 50 reactors doesn't have a Uranium mine. They exploit poor countries like Niger and leave an environmental catastrophe there. Uranium mining is the largest business in Niger and the life expectations is not much about 50 years there. If nuclear mining would be so great and people would make a lot of money from mining, this should be much higher.

Obviously it is not the case.

Starting a rebuttal with the word "wrong" seems rather counter-productive. If you have a reasonable point that disproves mine, then anybody reading it would notice this and as such the "wrong" is not required. If on the other hand, your point does not in fact counteract mine, then making such a strong statement seems rather foolish.

To begin: * Uranite (U3O8) is a major ore of uranium https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Uraninite and is in fact mostly uranium by weight. * "Uranium mining is the largest business in Niger and the life expectations is not much about 50 years there." Is an example of 'correlation does not imply causation'. To give you an example, the number of pirates have gone down over the last few hundred years. Global temperatures have gone up over the last few hundred years. From that information alone you cannot say that the lack of pirates causes global warming.

* I'd also mention here that there are large amounts of diamonds sourced from africa. A trade that is very profitable, yet leaves the people themselves with very little money nor increased standard of living.

* From the wikipedia article you specified: "Because uranium ore emits radon gas, uranium mining can be more dangerous than other underground mining, unless adequate ventilation systems are installed.". Assuming these safeguards are met, I fail to see how it would be 2,000,000 times as dangerous as coal mining.

I will, however, correct my previous statement. -Natural uranium has an energy density of 443,000MJ/kg -Coal has an energy density of 32.5MJ/kg.

Hence to produce the same amount of energy as you can produce using one KG of natural uranium you require 13630kg of coal.

Assuming the risk of coal mining is measured in a certain number of fatalities per kilogram mined (equivalent to a certain m^3 mined, given a constant density of the mined material) is R_C and R_U for coal and uranium respectively then the expected number of fatalities per "1kg of uranium equivalent energy" is then R_U and 13630R_C.

As such for coal to be "safer" 13630R_C needs to be < R_U, a statement I consider unlikely.

You have now found out a little bit about the energy density of Uranium. It has little to do with how dangerous mining is and what the consequences are (exposure to Radon, contamination of drinking water, ...).

Fact is, here in Germany we have been mining for coal for decades. It has a lot of negative impacts on nature. It is still going on. But it is slowly phased out against political opposition.

Uranium mining OTOH has been phased out already. Uranium mining has such severe negative effects on the nature that in Germany it is closed with huge monetary investments.

You can read about the closing of the Wismut mine here: http://www.wise-uranium.org/uwis.html

Mining for Uranium is now going on in remote areas or in states with the political structure for it.

Can you show that the rate of fatality for uranium mining is more then 13630 times the rate of fatality of coal mining per kilogram (or cubic meter)? (Including secondary effects of both)

At the end of the day, that specifically is what we are trying to find out.

Maybe you. Not me.

I found already out that all Uranium mines here in Western Europe have been closed, mostly because of environmental issues and because they are not economical.

I can see every day that millions of people live near coal plants and coal mines - here in Germany. There is is a large movement to shut down coal plants and end coal mining. But that movement still has some miles to go.

These are facts.

Your calculations based on energy density are useless. Nobody wants to live near a Uranium mine contaminating ground water. No matter how much energy Uranium provides. In more densely populated areas like Europe this is hopeless.

The existing Uranium mines are almost all located in areas where not the consumers of nuclear electricity live.

There is enough nuclear fuel to last for billions of years. Billions. With a b.

See: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html

See the sun at the sky. There is a fusion process going on. We just need to harvest it.

Similarly if you look underground you will find a mantle hot with radioactivity.

Jawaad, as you know, I live in Tokyo too. I haven't had to stop drinking the water because it's never gotten higher than water I've already consumed elsewhere in my travels. Even when they said it wasn't safe for children, I was drinking it because the levels weren't very high at all. I filled some containers with tap water to have on hand if the situation got worse but so far it hasn't. If you're having trouble finding foods like milk or natto it's mostly due to disruptions in the supply chain and food processing or packaging plants up north that were taken out by the tsunami.

I've been drinking the tap water and I would eat the spinach grown in fukushima as well. It makes me very sad that farmers who are struggling to get by and have perfectly fine food to sell are not able to sell it.

I can understand people being afraid of the uncertainty of the situation. I think that is somewhat rational: the situation could get worse. You might not trust TEPCO or the government to properly handle the situation. Those are risks that need to be addressed and maybe the answer is that nuclear power isn't the way to go. That decision should be made based on hard data of real threats, costs and unknowns.

I think though, that to date, nobody outside of a very small radius (mostly TEPCO workers) have ever been in danger of receiving dangerous levels of radiation. People confuse cautionary recommendations with actual threats. On the other hand, people are dying due to lack of supplies and medication from the tsunami. Farmers and fishermen are losing their livelihood because of fear of radiated food.

BTW, Here's the link to the water supply/rain water radiation levels I use:

http://atmc.jp/water/

"20 km or so of this country is probably going to be left unlivable"

[citation requested] I haven't seen any hint of that. Is that from actual scientific reports based on sensible standards of "unlivable" (i.e., based in sensible risk analysis), or is it just based on unscientific worries?

And did you have a hard time finding "uncontaminated" meat because there was actually a shortage of meat that was scientifically unsafe to eat, or because there was a shortage of meat due to an overzealous safety organization that proactively condemned vast swathes of goods unnecessarily to look active and because people are just really scared? Because if the latter, this turns the argument circular; nuclear is dangerous because governments overreach and aggressively condemn things because nuclear is dangerous.

If you got actual sources, I'd love to hear about them, in all seriousness, and then I'd like to know why I didn't hear about 20 kms being rendered uninhabitable yet. But I'd like to see the citation first.

I remember Erik Naggum calling out this "citation requested" calls as being passive aggressive, On HN I see them mostly coming along when the view of the other is not accepted. The radiation levels and the finding of Pu in the ground, leaking out radioactive water and the like have already been reported to death.

This call for sources, at the same time demanding they be sensible and have to use sensible definitions in this kind of discussions has an unfortunate "get off my lawn" tone to it.

Clearing the area is also already openly discussed by the Japanese governement. By contrasting "overzealous safety organizations" with "sensible risk based analysis" you put excatly no argument forward but already indicate what you would do with any such source.

> I remember Erik Naggum calling out this "citation requested" calls as being passive aggressive, On HN I see them mostly coming along when the view of the other is not accepted.

I, personally, have provided citations for every single person who requested one of me as far as I know, not to mention answering quite a few requests made to others. Feel free to trawl my comment history looking for examples. If you can find one that I haven't seen, I'll go dig up a citation to support it.

It's hard to trust someone's opinion if they can't explain the facts upon which they base it. Of course I'm still wrong sometimes, but the exercise helps me to prove to myself whether or not I know what the hell I'm talking about. I often find new information and refine my opinions accordingly. That's how I learn.

"On HN I see them mostly coming along when the view of the other is not accepted."

No shit?

"The radiation levels and the finding of Pu in the ground, leaking out radioactive water and the like have already been reported to death."

None of which lead to "20 (presumably square) km" being rendered anything remotely resembling uninhabited. I still haven't heard anything that would even permanently condemn the land the reactor is on. The mere presence of plutonium in the water isn't that interesting.

It may help for context to realize that my house is a RADIOACTIVE DEATHTRAP. I have RADIOACTIVE GASSES seeping into my basement that were ABOVE THE LEGAL LIMIT. No, I am not kidding. I have a radon remediation system running all the time. See that bright red blotch in southern Michigan in [1]? That's where I live and have lived all my life. If we freaked out in linear proportion to people who are freaking out about the stuff happening in Japan, we wouldn't be talking about how Detroit is depopulating due to the bad economy, we'd be talking about how Detroit is a radioactive uninhabitable wasteland.

Except it isn't.

In fact, I bought this house knowing it was a RADIOACTIVE DEATHTRAP. It didn't significantly reduce the value, even, I didn't even get a deal. The radon remediation system has a big radioactivity symbol on it, so I seriously live in a house with a for-serious radioactivity symbol in it. I find myself wondering how many people flipping out do too.

I suppose arguably I can't really afford to just flip out and call it the holy and proper response or I'd have to, I don't know, burn my house down or something.

"By contrasting "overzealous safety organizations" with "sensible risk based analysis" you put excatly no argument forward but already indicate what you would do with any such source."

Bullshit. Flat out bullshit. I will happily accept analysis that shows that some exposure would trip the rather conservative limits of, say, the US OSHA or EPA. What I have seen is that it remains orders of magnitude below those limits for almost everybody who isn't right on top of the plant, like, on the property. It sounds like you're the one trying to hide irrational beliefs from the light of sanity, not me.

[1]: http://www.epa.gov/radon/pdfs/zonemapcolor.pdf

He said 'is probably going to be' not 'has already been'.

There is plenty of suggestive evidence, like the nytimes article EScott11 referenced, showing cesium 137 contamination 200% of Chernobyl levels 25 miles from the plant, or the recent Greenpeace video where they max out their Geiger handhelds 35km from the plant, that there are going to be some fairly widespread consequences to the contamination of soil by radioactive material.

Maxing out a handheld geiger counter is misleading because they've got a sesitivity knob. A friend brought one to a party recently and showed everyone that their soda cans would max out the counter (at full sensitivity). Believe it or not, some people then refused to drink more soda because they thought it was contaminated. Better not bring them into a brick building!

This doesn't address what you want perfectly, but you might find it interesting.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/04/02/world/asia/ass...

But one expert says the radiation leaks will be ongoing and it could take 50 to 100 years before the nuclear fuel rods have completely cooled and been removed.
"As the water leaks out, you keep on pouring water in, so this leak will go on for ever," said Dr John Price, a former member of the Safety Policy Unit at the UK's National Nuclear Corporation.
"There has to be some way of dealing with it. The water is connecting in tunnels and concrete-lined pits at the moment and the question is whether they can pump it back.

"The final thing is that the reactors will have to be closed and the fuel removed, and that is 50 to 100 years away.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/04/01/3179487.htm

I actually heard an interview with this guy, and he was assuming the exclusion zone (20km from the plant I think?) would remain for at least 50 years.

I can believe it becoming impossible to buy or sell land there. That'd go a long way to making it unlivable in any practical sense, no matter what the actual safety of the area is.

Couldn't you give the same challenge to the area near a coal powerplant? And oh, our entire climate has been significantly soured by that.

Every power generation method we have significantly impacts the local environment, even geothermal and hydroelectric. There are a lot of accidents and environmental corruption stories every year, but one accident in a worst case scenario impacts you personally, and suddenly you're issuing edicts and saying hard facts are "handwaving" and "misinformation."

Great.

I have gone on record and said that I support Nuclear power. I think it is necessary.

However, to simplify further, I think that Nuclear power supports hand wave deep issues of trust that develop because of the way these issues are treated.

I don't imply that there are any easy answers to power. Solar, wind, etc.. are not mature enough (to the best of my understanding). Coal releases more radiation (but not in catastrophic all-at-once scenarious)

Eat your dog food. Spend real money doing so. Otherwise, frankly, it's internet posing.

I think detractors "handwave" the importance of building new reactors. By refusing to allow existing reactors to be obsoleted, they force existing power stations to stay in operation without interruption, keeping outdated and inferior equipment online long past its prime.

Consider how many people die around the world mining coal, or breathing coal ash.

I'm sure their families are just as unwilling to listen to people talk about coal being safe as you are unwilling to listen to people talking about nuclear being safe. The difference? There are MANY more of them.

>I find it incredibly offensive to see the Americans on this board downplaying the damage from Fukushima.

I don't think anybody wanted to offend. People just learning what mSv is, and there is a lot of propaganda and brainwashing happening here and around the world. Big money at stake.

Unless you are under 1 year old, you _can_ drink milk and water. You are overreacting.

If you are female and pregnant, that overreaction can be justified, but otherwise you only have your overreaction to blame.

Nuclear power is cleaner than coal or oil.

We just need to build stronger and safer reactors.

Personally I'm glad OP posted this article. Fukushima was tragic, but it didn't give everyone the right to abandon rational thought.

I used to work for a state pirg banging on doors to complain about nuclear power. Spreading fear by barking "3 mile island, chernobyl" etc. Then one day I knocked on the door of a nuclear physicist and he explained to me why I was wrong.

Buy Fukushiman land. Raise your kids there. Feed them local produce. To thy own self be true.

I am not defending coal or solar or whatever. I am referring to the closed attitude of the nuclear industry. There is a huge problem with nuclear defenders in Japan who don't eat their own dogfood. You'd think they would be happy to do so since the reward is huge (improved confidence) and the risk is only 20 or more years down the line (if ever)

The problem with Fukushima was that it was an outdated design that should have been decommissioned. Nobody who points out the relative safety of nuclear power wants us to build more Mark I BWR's. My interest is in Travelling Wave Reactors and Thorium Molten Salt Reactors.

But the problem is, when people freak out about Fukushima, they don't say "Hey! Mark I BWR's aren't safe! We should shut down those designs!" They go after Nuclear with a wide brush, and instead we're stuck with more gas and coal dependance.

Seems sort of revisionist to say "of course Mark I BWR's aren't safe". You know what nuclear experts were saying 3 weeks ago? They were talking about all the safety features, and the multiple levels of basically impervious containment, and how radioactive material would never get out into the environment. And here we are with a pretty serious radioactive mess to clean up (and from the looks of it it's probably going to get worse before it gets better)

If you're making the argument that we more closely scrutinize 40 year old designs, you'll find no resistance here.

But the problem is that using Fukushima as an argument against nuclear, is like using a car crash as an argument against transportation.

My point is they were either wrong or lying. Both possibilities are pretty worrying.

They were wrong because they didn't take into account the possibility that backup power would be unavailable for so long. The backup generators and their switchgear were sited very poorly--behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami.

Please note that I'm not saying the reactor designs themselves weren't old and out of date. They were. But that wasn't the root cause of the problems. The stresses that these reactors have withstood due to the lack of backup power are far beyond any safety specification they were built to.

The problem is that people also compare this with outdated designs for coal plants.

There are much cleaner modern coal plants with filters. Still coal is dirty and dangerous.

In the nuclear industry you have new designs. But this does not solve the basic problems:

* mining of Uranium is dirty

* you need to transport dangerous material

* nuclear weapons can be produced

* reprocessing is extremely dirty

* storage is unsolved

* it promotes large corporations with all problems (corruption, ...)

* a society needs to be sufficiently advanced to handle the risk (i.e. better than Japan, the Soviet Union, or the US)

* the capital costs are large, needs to financed by the government

Plus with the new reactors you get interesting new dangers. Ever heard of 'stuxnet'? There are now viruses and attacks against nuclear facilities based on computer viruses.

Look a bit more into the different alternative nuclear designs. We have enough stored 'waste' to use it as fuel for a long time, not requiring much if any mining. Nuclear weapons can not be produced from these reactors. They use the material so storage is not an issue. They can use passive cooling which does not depend on computers that could be infected.

How long does the passive cooling work?

The problem with Chernobyl was that it was an outdated design that should have been decommissioned. The problem with Fukushima was that it was an outdated design that should have been decommissioned. Does Mr Brown want to wait another 5 years to use the same excuse for Washington's Columbia Generating Station?

If you're living relatively close to a coal power plant you're already worse off. Statistically, you should be far more afraid of living next to one.

I'm not saying it's something that should be dismissed, but I do think that we just have to take into account that anything that handles humongous amounts of energy in a concentrated space is dangerous, but nuclear energy is less so than most alternatives.

Or an oil refinery, people in the area close to the La Teja oil refinery here in Uruguay have significantly increased cases of mercury poisoning and child underdevelopment.

And here in Uruguay, the current way to supplement the already exhausted hydroelectric power is burning oil - I'm advocating a nuclear power plant to get us out of our current energy crisis (and I would have it in my backyard if needed)

I live in the state (Illinois) with the most nuclear power plants. By far. It suits me just fine.

By your reasoning, you should be raising your kids on a coal ash dump. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/us/07sludge.html

Stating that air travel is safer then cars doesn't mean that I wish myself to be strapped upon an early glider and hurled off a cliff.

The fact that one such glider still exists and is apparently in use has no bearing to the current state of the art of aeroplane design. Similarly that one old, outdated and utterly inferior reactor can fail when provoked says nothing of the current state of the art of reactor design.

CANDU reactors are safe, in fact they have a hard time getting anything to happen on a good day. If something went wrong the worst that would happen is the reactor would stop working.

Stopping reactors is not the problem, those in Fukushima did stop properly as the earthquake struck. The problem is dealing with the decay heat aftewards.

I think that's what's good about CANDU, we were so poor here in Canada it was designed using separate tubes which makes it possible to remove entire fuel bundle tubes without requiring the core to be de-pressurized, it's kind of a modular core from what I've read.

We just need to build newer reactors.

The problem isn't that we don't have designs that can deal with these sorts of problems. The problem is that we don't have the political strength of will to decommission the older, unsafe plants and replace them with newer, safer plants. Similarly we don't have the political strength of will to do what is required to ensure uncompromised safety, ie. moving spent fuel into secured areas away from power plants, breeding fuel to dramatically reduce the amount of radioactive waste created and burning that waste out to make it less radioactive before it ever needs to be stored, etc.

1,000 upvotes.

Nuclear power is inherently UNSAFE. It takes a lot of hubris to claim otherwise. It harnesses intense fundamental forces of nature that we can never control without a small but inevitable risk of horrible damage and harm to unlucky populations. In controlling power of this magnitude, it is inevitable that there will be mistakes or freak events that allow this power to seep out of whatever is the latest in fundamental-forces-of-nature-containment technology. Coal plants may cause awful air pollution, but there is no chance of radioactively poisoning an entire city. There's a reason no coal power plant has ever been paid quite as much attention as Fukushima, isn't there?

What is that reason, exactly? When Banqauio kills 171,000, Bhopal kills 10,000, and 30,000 people die every year from coal pollution, why exactly don't we give energy production methods like that the kind of scrutiny we're giving Fukushima?

I had to look up the Banquiao dam disaster:

"the 1975 Banqiauo Dam collapse in China killed 171000 people"

"The dam failure killed an estimated 171,000 people; 11 million people lost their homes"

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

I did remember the Bhopal gas disaster:

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

Because Bhopal had nothing to do with energy production? And are you claiming Bhopal didn't get massive media coverage? Because it did.

I know, Bhopal was a chemical processing plant. But it was a massive disaster, that killed thousands, and nobody came out of that saying we should never process chemicals.

Perhaps we shouldn't mass produce deadly environmentally destructive pesticides either? Would that be a bold statement?

Why do you keep changing the subject? Quit talking about coal and pesticides and explain why it's okay to risk the lives of entire cities of people for the sake of extra electric output?

Edit: I never disagreed with the article's title. I was agreeing with the parent post's sentiment that regardless of the numbers, downplaying the suffering of the people in Fukushima and the risks they still face is wrong. Nuclear power is dangerous and can have terrible costs. It's entirely reasonable not to view it as a praiseworthy technology.

"Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity"

In case you are unversed in the nuanced English being used here, "safe" != "safest", nor are their meanings equivalent. So why do you keep changing the subject?

Nuclear isn't 'safe', but it is the 'safest'. Modern society assumes some amount of risk, get over it.

why it's okay to risk the lives of entire cities of people for the sake of extra electric output?

Do you not understand, that's the exact reason why people are bringing up coal.

If we were to switch off of coal and onto nuclear, scores less people would die and get sick. A massive amount. Not to mention the benefits of halting climate change.

That doesn't mean nuclear is all sunshine and rainbows, and nobody who reasonably supports nuclear over coal thinks that.

You don't know enough to make that statement. If you replace coal with PWR nuclear reactors, you still have potential problems. You are projecting past performance into the future which is extremely foolish.

Deepwater Horizon would have made a much better example, I think.

Uh, maybe we ought to give them both a lot more scrutiny? I'm not trying to champion coal power here. Fuck coal power. I'm just pointing out the obvious: nuclear power is dangerous.

Do you operate a fridge?

> There's a reason no coal power plant has ever been paid quite as much attention as Fukushima, isn't there?

Yes. There is a reason: sensationalism.

Exactly. The only coal incident that has gotten anywhere near the amount of attention it deserves is Centralia Pennsylvania. (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Centralia,_Pe...)

That's just a dramatic case that makes for good soundbites though, unbelievable more places have been rendered effectively uninhabitable by coal mining, to say nothing of the damage it does to local food sources (acid rivers anyone?)

The thought that nuclear is more dangerous, or has done more damage, than coal, comes from nothing but ignorance of the coal industry and it's history.

So now the point is that coal disasters aren't being talked about? I thought we were discussing whether nuclear power is safe. Are you actually going to stand up and on the record proclaim that in general, free of context, nuclear energy is safe. Just that one sentence: nuclear energy is safe.

No it isn't. It's fucking dangerous. Air pollution killing lots of people doesn't change this. Radiation kills people too.

The title of this article is that nuclear power is the safest, relative to other sources of power currently capable of scaling to needs.

That's a very important distinction, so I would ask you to please consider that.

Safer than wind and solar? I don't think so. Those stats that we saw a while ago that people die from solar too because they fall off the roof are pretty ridiculous. 10 years from now all new homes will come with solar panels pre-installed, so people won't have to set them up themselves. Plus, you could always hire someone else to do it for you.

In my country we're building giant wind turbines that will generate twice as much energy as our nuclear plant.

I'm not saying we should ban nuclear power forever, but it shouldn't become the main source of energy either, at least not until we're researched it enough to be 100x safer than it is today, and when it will deliver 100x more energy than solar and wind can, through actual fusion or whatever. Until then, I don't see why we should blindly keep building them when there are perfectly viable clean energy alternatives out there already, or just slightly behind, and just need a little push capital wise to become more advanced.

Clean energy alternatives are not viable. And they won't be for a long time.

Wind and solar power are inherently unsuitable for providing base-load coverage - you need to have sufficient generating capacity spooled-up and available to cover any lulls in output. They can reduce the environmental impact of conventional generation, but they're useless on their own.

Nuclear power already produces 100x more than even the largest wind farm, because when you're working out how much base-load coverage you've got, you need to think about that wind farm at it's worst-case 0 MW output.

Renewable already generate similar amounts compared to nuclear.

A single wind farm may have 0 MW output. But for a European grid of wind farms this is highly unlikely. Like 1% of the year. For that 1% we will have other energy sources pick up nicely.

I think you're seriously overestimating the current potential for solar photovoltaics and wind.

Your definition of "safest" is not entirely true.

They are "safe" in the sense that the probability of a catastrophe is 1 in 10,000 years (that is the statistic).

But they are exponential orders of magnitude more deadly, with the consequences thereof lasting for tens of thousands of years, when that 1/10,000th year comes around.

With 500 nuclear power plants operating, we can expect a serious nuclear catastrophe every 20 years.

These numbers are based just on nuclear power plants and exclude nuclear submarines, warheads etc.

I do not believe that is his definition of safe.

I believe he is using the standard definition of safe, for a power source, which is expected deaths/Twh.

Deaths per TWH is no real measure of safety at all when it comes to nuclear. Accidents affect not only human beings but the environment and indeed entire continents and the ecosystems thereof. Even today when they hunt wild boar in Germany many of the boar are found to have been irradiated as a result of Chernobyl, and hazardous for consumption. These events cross borders. It would be foolish to attempt to comprehend their relative significance in terms of death counts.

Applying deaths per TWH to nuclear is naive. It's an abstraction that in no way reflects the underlying reality, and which leads the general populace into mad ambivalence. It's the kind of rhetoric you hear on Animal Farm. This idea that some deaths are better than others. In fact, it's a question of asymmetric risk with outsized consequences. If you learn anything from Ben Graham or Warren Buffett, it's that that's not the kind of game you want to be playing, unless you're really smart like LTCM. You don't want to have anything to do with it, especially not if there is human mental apparatus, governments, and contractors involved. There are too many variables you cannot control, and they are not captured by deaths per TWH.

The second thing to learn from Graham and Doddsville, when dealing with asymmetric odds is that history is no reliable guide to the future. What happened last year or the year before, is no indication of what may happen next year or the manner in which we can expect it to happen. That nuclear catastrophes have historically not been catastrophic (according to the author), is no reason for the author to believe that they may continue to remain so.

Yet the Washington Post article has based its argument on the premise that you can even measure deaths per TWH. You cannot count deaths directly and indirectly related to a nuclear accident. We have learned that much from the history of these accidents, and it would be ignorant and insensitive to claim otherwise. Take for instance Chernobyl, does the author truly believe that only 50 people have already died as a direct and indirect result? Even the most conservative numbers reported (deaths actually incurred) are higher, and show significant variance between sources:

"Estimates of the number of deaths potentially resulting from the accident vary enormously; the World Health Organization (WHO) suggest it could reach 4,000 while a Greenpeace report puts this figure at 200,000 or more. A UNSCEAR report places the total deaths from radiation at 64 as of 2008." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

From those to whom much as been given, much will be expected.

Brilliant post. Thanks for getting my point across much better than I could. It really is like Animal Farm.

Bringing up coal when people start bitching about nuclear is no different from bringing up car accidents when people start bitching about flying.

Danger is relative, and relative to the rest of the power industry, nuclear is absurdly safe.

6% of nuclear power plants had radiation-releasing incidents INES 4 or bigger. Chernobyl and Fukushima alone comprise about 2% of NPPs worldwide.

There must be some creative statistics at works behind those safety figures.

  deaths/TerraWatt.

Such dastardly statistical trickery!

There is a big difference if you count Chernobyl deaths as 28 or as 4500.

This just means that the bar is set very low. Any method of producing power that harms large numbers of people deserves serious scrutiny. We shouldn't be discouraging it, we should be calling for more!

NOBODY is saying that we shouldn't learn from the past when it comes to nuclear power. However, sensationalists such as yourself, claiming shit like "Nuclear power is inherently UNSAFE. It takes a lot of hubris to claim otherwise." are not adding to rational discussion, but rather detracting from it.

The only thing people like you accomplish is preventing modern reactor designs from being implemented, therefore effectively discouraging improvement in the industry.

Every design was once a modern design. Nuclear power is inherently unsafe. That's why we're having this discussion.

What you fail to understand is that everything is unsafe, there's a risk attached to all forms of power generation, nothing is 100% safe.

You are handwaving when it comes to the dangers of coal power, and screaming at the top of your lungs when it comes to nuclear power, despite the fact that coal power kills people every year, despite the fact that coal power plants actually emit radioactive particles in the air, and nuclear plants normally don't.

The point is that most forms of power generation we have, today, is less safe and causes more environmental impact than nuclear power. And yet you are upset about nuclear power? You are not being rational, you are sensationalist.

Claiming something doesn't make it so, not even if you do it repeatedly and use lots of italics.

It's not really a "discussion" when you're just saying the same thing over and over, without addressing the data presented by others or providing any data of your own.

That's because none of the data posted is relevant to my point. I'm arguing that it is extremely unethical to subject people and the environment to any significant risk of nuclear disaster. When the risk is such that multiple incidents are all but guaranteed over a long time period (like 50 or 100 years), we are effectively agreeing to the principle that productivity and efficiency are greater concerns than some hundreds or thousands or millions of lives (we can't predict the number) and worth destroying and sacrificing those lives in exchange for. I reject this principle, as any sane person should. I believe coal energy should be evaluated on the same basis.

The reason to focus on nuclear over coal power and other bad industrial practices is that nuclear still has a lot of support among educated people. Coal has been discredited. No one thinks we should build more coal plants (aside from those who profit from them). But the amount of cheerleading you see for nuclear among a population like HN's is incredible. I don't know if it's a testament to the industry's financial weight or what, but it's clearly getting a pass where other harmful industries are not. That's bad.

And bloodletting was once modern medicine. You're so full of shit, it's unbelievable.

Come now, there's no need to get personal.

Everything we humans do is inherently unsafe. Using the phrase "fundamental force of nature" as though it has a sort of supernatural power behind it isn't going to change that. Gravity and inertia are also fundamental elements of nature, which kill far more people than radiation. Do we refer to automobiles as "fundamental force of nature containment technology"?

The main problem with radiation is that it's invisible and poorly understood by the public, and has been overused in movies as a fear device. Why are people seemingly more afraid of radiation maybe killing a few people than a tsunami killing many thousands? Consider if Fukushima had been a nerve gas plant, which may not have as stringent of regulations as nuclear power.

Nobody advocates building more nerve gas plants.

While the safest, the waste will be with the Earth for a long time to come. Longer than any corporation will be around, or government agency. There has to be a clear cut plan to deal with the waste of nuclear power that accounts for it's life span, and possible natural disasters. Currently all waste is stored at the power plants and the only current plan is to encase the waste in concrete. But where to go with that concrete? How to label the concrete to make sure future generations know that it is dangerous? How to ensure constant security and safety of the waste? We cannot move forward with nuclear energy until the problem of its waste is dealt with.

that waste can be burned in another types of reactors. Unfortunately, because of extremely high entry barrier, there isn't much chances for these or some other new types of reactors to be developed and put into production. Ie. we stuck with almost 60 year old technology [pretty much the first generation with some slight modifications] of nuclear energy production.

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

Doesn't burning nuclear waste just turn it into a gas or a pile of ash with the same radioactive elements? Burning is a chemical reaction, so the actual nuclei of the atoms shouldn't be changed at all.

it is nuclear "burning". The point is to have designs which produce less dangerous waste [ideally the chain of nuclear reactions should end with non-radioactive elements, yet the reality is far from ideal] or use the existing waste to produce energy from it - the "waste" of existing reactors is still extremely potent nuclear fuel as the existing, very primitive and dating back to Manhattan Project, designs are just skimming the top, easiest, portion of energy.

My favorite is mixed design - nuclear fusion core which itself may be even a bit net energy negative (and thus much more realistic in the near future) and which main purpose is to generate neutrons to burn pretty much anything "heavy" and cheap. Turn the power to the core off - the thing just stops.

The current storage facilities for nuclear waste proposed or otherwise are quite unreal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_re...

Yukka mountain, anyone? Oh that's right, the shrill keep blocking it out of shear, willful ignorance of the either the local or global realities.

That consideration is the biggest.

Nuclear power is safe, intrinsically. Nuclear waste is devastation waiting to happen (if not now, in the future).

It's a bit much to say that a system that requires multiple elaborate systems of safeguards is "intrinsically" safe.

"Intrinsically safer" was probably the better term.

Not really.

If you take the waste out of a thorium cycle reactor (ie. no fission products with half lifes > 100 hears), burn it down until there is basically nothing left then turn it into glass and stick it underneath solid granite in the middle of the worlds most geologically stable tectonic plate then no. It's not exactly devistation.

When ever I see this I realize its not really helpful. Sure all the facts are true but as I've said before you can't argue with people who are scared.

In other news a hole developed in a SWA 737 jet flying to Sacremento and did an emergency descent from 32000 to 12000 feet. Will it cause people to stop flying? Some, perhaps, but for the most part no.

When you read that someone on the freeway died driving a '72 Buick that only had lap belts and no air bags you say "gee, its great we have them now, we've just had fewer highway deaths than have ever been recorded since 1949.

The same is certainly true with nuclear power plants, if we were rational we would say, "fine" lets relicense "older" reactors on the provision they are dismantled and replaced. Have we learned a lot about building reactors? Sure, could we get rid of the older ones faster if we built new safe ones more quickly? Absolutely. But we have to either learn not to be afraid (respectful yes, afraid no) of nuclear power and radiation. Perhaps we should learn about it in school, perhaps we should provide low cost detectors for folks.

I think its part of growing up as a species.

Only marginally related, but it has been surprising to me that US media seems to talk about the risk of a "radiation cloud floating over the Pacific" (which is effectively a non-existent risk to health), and yet doesn't talk about the risk to Californian nuclear plants from earthquakes & tsunamis.

For example, to quote Wikipedia:

Diablo Canyon Power Plant is an electricity-generating nuclear power plant at Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California. It was built directly over a geological fault line, and is located near a second fault... Diablo Canyon was originally designed to withstand a 6.75 magnitude earthquake from four faults, including the nearby San Andreas and Hosgri faults.,[6] but was later upgraded to withstand a 7.5 magnitude quake.... In September 1981, PG&E discovered that a single set of blueprints was used for these structural supports; workers were supposed to have reversed the plans when switching to the second reactor, but did not.[11] According to Charles Perrow, the result of the error was that "many parts were needlessly reinforced, while others, which should have been strengthened, were left untouched."

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

Or take a look at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which is literally built on the beach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_S...

Urrgh, I agree, this is so ludicrous and stupid. I wish I could say it was surprising, but it is an example of what I mean when I say 'maybe we (collectively) aren't mature enough to handle <insert awesome technology here>'.

Not even one mention of solar power? Maybe the technology is not at its peak yet, but combines with saving a lot of energy, is it not an option? Let's not forget that a lot of money went into perfecting nuclear power, probably a lot more than into solar power.

Comparing with coal deaths seems a bit like a strawman. Also I don't trust the way the victims of Chernobyl are calculated. Adding up victims from survivor stories ("all my colleagues are dead by now") seems to easily give more than 26 deaths.

Yes, I love electricity, too - especially for computing. But I also think the world could be improved a lot by saving energy at the right places. I'd be much happier if there were less cars, for example. I think I could power my computer with a solar panel, even when not living in the desert.

Heating seems to be another big one. Where I live renting is the norm, so home owners don't have much of an incentive to insulate houses properly (renters pay the energy bill).

At the very least, please give me an Android phone with a Geiger Counter so that I can check the milk when I go shopping...

Strangely enough it takes very little money, nor energy to produce nuclear power. It's very simple at its core. Have a look at the first research reactors and you'll find that you need basically no technology to produce reactors that produce useful amounts of energy.

On the other hand solar power, especially photovoltaics is stupidly complex. Photovoltaics requires semiconductor processes, arguably one of the most complex things ever reliably harnessed by man to create.

Saying that you want to power your computer from a solar cell seems green, until you think of all the energy that went into building that solar cell. All the waste materials, the toxic waste produced in fabrication, the pollution, etc. Then it seems decidedly less green then, say, plugging it in to the wall socket.

And yet nature all around us seems to thrive on solar power alone, with zero toxic waste byproduct.

I don't think pollution in production is a must, either. You don't have to dump your garbage in the river.

First off no, nature doesn't thrive off solar power alone. At the very least hydrothermal vents provide energy to most aquatic life past the thermocline.

I'd also like to point out that the sun produces more radioactivity then anything likely to be found on earth, and fusion as a whole accounts for all the heavy metals ever created in the universe. (just some food for thought).

I know about the hydrothermal vents, but I don't think nature needs them.

The sun example was discussed to death in another thread. Sorry, I think it is just a silly comparison.

Nature around us doesn't use eletricity either.

Of course it does. In any case, it uses power, the distinction is quite meaningless. Converting power can be done with a constant factor.

"Strangely enough it takes very little money, nor energy to produce nuclear power."

And since the new doctrine is that radiation is not dangerous at all, you will make us a good price for storing the nuclear waste in your backyard? I hear it helps grow bigger vegetables, too - win win.

That's a non sequitur.

Look up the first nuclear pile experiments and you'll find out just how primitive you can be and still produce a functioning nuclear reactor.

Sorry I don't speak latin? In any case, of course storage of waste has to factored into the cost? I don't see how it is relevant how easy it is to build a reactor. Guess what, it is even easier to start a fire, which produces a lot of energy, too.

I would advise Googling such things, but just so you know, "non sequitur" means "it doesn't follow" in Latin.

He's saying that what you said doesn't make much sense as a reply to that other post. Indeed, I'm not quite sure what your point was, there. If it was a joke, I missed it completely.

OT mentioned all the side costs of photovoltaic power, waste materials, pollution and so on, while stressing the simplicity of creating nuclear power.

So my remark simply was meant to draw attention to the waste products of nuclear power. Is it not logical to throw it into equation for nuclear power, too, if you throw it into the equation for photovoltaic power?

Thanks for clarifying. Your original comment was pretty confusing, though, as a reply.

Do you claim to not know spanish when people say they are going out for burritos?

I don't know, but I know that I'd like a burger right now.

Yet it takes Uranium and there's less and less easily available Uranium. It's a dead-end.

Everything is ultimately a dead end. You can thank entropy for that. The sun will die, too, as will any star we go to.

Fusion would probably be the best, because a large fraction of the universe's mass is hydrogen. Antimatter would also be cool, but it's also incredibly dangerous and we're far from being able to create significant amounts of it.

In the long run, we probably can't afford to drop any power sources. But in the long run, we're all dead.

There are large quantities of fissable materials which are not uranium. For example take thorium, which is roughly as common as lead.

Seth Godin made the same point last week--with a neat graphic:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-...

(He got his image from here: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visuali...)

hmmm, the entire article excludes the words 'weapons' and 'waste'. all nuclear reactors produce long lived radioactive wastes which are left for humanity to manage well beyond the forseeable future. Here in Australia, we've come up with a state-of-the-art answer to our own burden of nuclear waste (arising from 30 years of experimentation and research reactors) - we're building a road out to a remote desert location, building a shed and dumping the unwanted problem on the tribal lands of a disempowered, de-funded indigenous community. Real reassuring, huh?

As for weapons, although the old cold-war powers continue to slowly reduce the huge numbers of conventional nuclear weapons they hold, they're also building new ones. And at the same time as the total number of nuclear warheads in the world is slowly decreasing, the total number of actors holding those weapons is greater than ever, with the proliferation of nuclear materials and technologies spreading despite all rhetoric and pantomime surrounding the NPT. As Former US Vice President Al Gore said in 2006: "For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal ... then we'd have to put them in so many places we'd run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale."

finally, to the question of renewables : I totally reject the repeated assertions that renewables can't provide scalable or baseload power. Here in sunny Australia, we're following the lead of nations like Spain and building a few large grid connected solar-thermal and solar-hybrid plants, that compare well with the capacities of old fossil and hydro plants. Already, large remote communities in my part of the country are powered entirely by solar concentrator arrays.

So I say, stick your nuclear power reactors where the sun doesn't shine.

> all nuclear reactors produce long lived radioactive wastes which are left for humanity to manage well beyond the forseeable future.

That's just flat-out wrong. The "waste" from current nuclear reactors is perfectly fine as fuel in newer reactor designs, you can burn the fuel again to get more energy out of it, and reduce the half-life of it significantly. I'm confident that that process can be repeated again, and again, and again, so that at the end we won't have any waste left that needs to be stored.

Yet the public at large is still convinced that what was true in the 70's has to be true today, despite decades of research and technological innovation...

Nuclear power reactors can be produced without any real proliferation risk, see for example thorium reactors.

Similarly the thorium fuel cycle is a lot clearer, ie. assuming that you can recycle actinide wastes, there is very little radioactivity after the first few hundred years: http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/04/14/97/PDF/documen...

Finally, if you have waste of any sort that you want to keep away from humans (A large amount of chemical waste would also seem to fit this bill), where else would you put it, aside from the centre of the most geologically stable continent on earth? Thousands of kms from habitation, far from any groundwater, and most likely on a large sheet of granite given the geology of the outback. Assuming it was properly built underground, I can't think of a better place to put it.

Solar power is interesting, but it has two properties which make it less useful then it would first seem.

* First you need to find a place that is very hot and very dry. That generally requires that you move far inland and far north and away from the coastline. This then means that you somehow need to transfer the power to the major cities, which are built almost entirely on the coastline, causing massive amounts of energy loss.

* Secondly on any non-equitorial latitude you have the problem of seasons affecting your baseload capacity. This then means that trying to manage any power grid that derives a substantial amount of its power from solar thermal plants is going to be, well, an interesting problem.

* Finally you will always have the problem of trying to manage these types of power plants, ie. you can't simply "turn up" a solar thermal or photovoltaic plant like you can a gas fired or coal fired plant. This then causes issues when you have a sudden need for power.

Overall though, it is a very interesting source of renewable energy.

thanks A#:

thorium? maybe. but all of the reactors currently dotting the globe, and any of those which may be built in the near future, all use uranium. I'd hate for us to make the mistake of basing decisions about whether or not to retire existing aging uranium reactors on the promises of theoretical thorium models. We certainly shouldn't keep building dangerous uranium reactors simply because, one day, hopefully, there might be thorium models that might be safer. Like I said : this industry's been promising more than they can deliver since Go.

waste: out of sight / out of mind? not good enough: this material should remain prominent in the eyes and minds of the technological wizards who created it.

Solar: these sound like valid concerns, and I don't know enough to answer them, but I'm pretty sure that there's a lot more to build before we hit those constraints.

The candu reactors are thorium. As was AVR... Last I heard there were reactors in india/china using thorium.

All the gen IV reactors I remember are thorium based, however keep in mind that most of the gen IV reactors can be made with uranium, it's just that thorium is a rather nice fuel. Well, if you don't need to build any more nukes, that is.

To be perfectly honest, once you've mined out all of the nuclear materials out of nuclear waste, what you're left with is a fairly standard bundle of heavy metals that we deal with all the time in chemeng. (ie. what do you do to the Cad in Nicads?)

Anything that's fertile can be converted into fuel. Anything that's fissable is fuel. Anything that is usefully radioactive can be used either directly in a reactor or indirectly in betavoltaics and related.

One major problem at the moment is that it's not politically viable to reprocess waste anywhere near completely, and even though waste storage is basically solved in much the same way that the waste storage of garbase is basically solved (Where do you think the toxins go when you throw something else out?), we can't really do either and so you end up with waste just piling up in places where it honestly shouldn't be.

candu say they can do thorium, but no-one's actually doing it. Yeah maybe india and china have each experimented, but I don't think anyone's using thorium for power. there's a huge, rich thorium deposit down the road from me, but they're planning to bury it all again after extracting the associated REEs. Like I said, maybe one day we'll be making decisions about thorium reactors, but here and now it's uranium reactors (most of them GenII) that deserve our focus, because these are the ones which are operating or scheduled for construction.

You guys know about the problem of nuclear waste right? You've read plenty about it right?

Because this whole "it hasn't caused an apocalypse yet" argument in favor of nuclear power is just a tiny bit short-sighted. If you make your software like you reason about nuclear power, send me a note naming your products so I know what to stay away from.

Many modern reactor designs (Thorium LFTR's being the most prominent) are actually designed to help mitigate the problem of current waste by burning it as fuel. So if its waste that you are worried about, it seems sensible to support limited construction of modern reactors to address this problem.

You guys know about the problem of climate change, right? You've read plenty about it, right?

Because this whole "it hasn't caused an apocalypse yet" argument in favour of every-feasible-alternative-to-nuclear-power is just a tiny bit short-sighted. If you make your software like you reason about every-feasible-alternative-to-nuclear-power, send me a note naming your products so I know what to stay away from.

Perhaps attempting to solve a major problem with something that also causes major problems isn't much of a solution.

Eh.

Fossil fuels will destroy the biosphere. They regularly and fairly brutally destroy rather large swaths of it (see nigeria/etc.).

Hydroelectric plants destroy parts of the biosphere. They massively damage aquatic life and fish species and they have the rather nasty fact that if they fail they wash away a good portion of whatever is downstream (read: that city.).

Renewables tend to be very energy disperse, require large amounts of energy/land to produce and generally can't provide baseload power except for hydro power.

At the end of the day, there isn't any perfect answer, but all the effort directed at stopping nuclear power research seems very short sighted, seeing as it is currently the best answer to baseload power that we have.

The half life of most software is 18 months or less (the number of users decreases by half), so you can be way sloppier in it's construction.

I looooves me some electricity.

So, even though I'm presently suffering some annoyances in my daily life here in Tokyo (sporadically contaminated drinking water, suspect milk and other foodstuffs, not enough electricity to maintain our previous standard of living, Internet outages forfuckssake), and even though I bristle any time anybody (this article's author included) ignorantly implies that we know all the bad things that were (or will be) caused by the meltdown at Chernobyl, I am totally 'pro-nuke' in the sense that I want more nuke plants to be built and maintained to produce electricity for us to use.

And, the premise that nuke power is the safest power we've come up with (among power sources that actually have produced a significant fraction of the power we use), is incontrovertibly true. This article is only one of dozens making that point.

However, people take this idea a bit too far, by not putting it into the right time context. A truly bad nuke disaster is forever (not literally, but for all intents and purposes). And we've never really had one yet. The thinking that Chernobyl is as bad as it can get is totally, obviously wrong--but it is implicit in a lot of the discussion.

Maybe Fukushima won't get to the level of Chernobyl--and that's still a maybe btw, as it is still getting worse--but it's easy and plausible to conceive of how it could have been much worse. A couple more serial failures, the epicenter of the quake being closer, whatever--this ancient, obsolete plant could very well have had all six reactors achieve full meltdown.

The woeful, pathetic--even funny, it's so bad--disaster preparedness that we now know TEPCO had implemented confirms a basic thing a lot of us have suspected: collectively, as a society (or separately, as a bunch of disparate societies), we just might not be mature enough in our thinking to strike the right balance of precaution and preparedness to handle nuclear power as safely as it should be handled.

Technologically, I think nuke power is awesome. Societally, our ability to responsibly deal with the dangers it presents is very suspect, IMO. Unfortunately, I think that is a much harder problem to address.

Probably some societies are better than others at this. Much like some seven year olds are responsible enough to handle a pocket knife and others totally aren't.

What we've seen (and are still seeing) in Japan has been much more pathetic, unprepared, and technologically primitive than a lot of us would have expected. Much more like my dumbshit little nephew who cut off the tip of his little finger and then sat there crying about it than like the one who taught himself to whittle sticks into Indian figurines.

Because the response to Fukushima has been so haphazard, reactive, and incompetent, I think many normal people now have this gut-reaction urge to reevaluate nuclear power, and that urge is basically correct. Of course, there is a lot of hysteria and empirically incorrect thinking flying around, but that happens any time a large number of humans discuss just about anything.

Still, the takeaway from this disaster shouldn't be 'nuclear power is teh awesome! no problem, bro!! nukes ftw!!'

It should be that nuclear power is indeed awesome, but our human systems that govern the deployment, administration, safeguarding, and--perhaps most importantly--sunsetting of nuclear power plants needs to be significantly reworked and dramatically improved.

I don't see why we should build even one more plant without the safety planning and preventive measures being an order of magnitude better than they have been so far. OTOH, I hope we can get it together to demand that work be done, and then do it, so that we can build more power plants, so that we can get our electricity back and I can turn on my lights and air conditioner here without feeling like an asshole.

> nuke power is the safest power we've come up with (among power sources that actually have produced a significant fraction of the power we use)

This is crucial, and is why blanket statements like "nuclear power is safe" are dangerous. There is an absolutely essential qualifier required on the end of any assertion about nuclear safety, and I'm glad to see that you put it in parentheses here. Nuclear power is the best...at scale. It's completely rational to recognize that for what it is.

I will be the first to praise the virtues of renewable energy. Solar, wind, tidal, and so on are all far better implementations to solve the problem of producing electricity. All of them, however, have a crippling fault that prevents them from reaching the potential of economics and supply that nuclear can. Importantly, that doesn't doom them -- that just means more investment and thinking is required before they can reach their potential.

Hell, renewable energy is the energy sector's Python 3. We'll get there someday, you can use it now, and it's a fabulous nirvana of harmony. Today, however, it's just a little rough around the edges, and a challenge to work with because the full support of the ecosystem isn't there. So, for now, we advise Python 2: let's split some atoms.

Watching HN's reaction to Fukushima has aggravated me at times, and made me cheer at others; it's naïveté to exclaim that nuclear power is completely safe, but a roughly equal helping of naïveté to claim that there are superior alternatives at this moment.

(Edited for brevity.)

"Scientific American, a most conservative scientific publication, in a cover story on October 26, 2009 -- unveiled its 'A Plan for a Sustainable Future.' It declared in its 'Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables" that, 'wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world's energy, eliminating all fossil fuels.'

The British magazine New Scientist, in a special October 11-17, 2009, issue on safe, clean, renewable energy technologies -- titled 'Our Brighter Future' -- presented a United Nations report declaring that 'renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world's electricity needs.'"

From: "Renewables Are More Than Ready"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-grossman/renewables-are-m...

"Water" sounds like it would include such things as the Banqiao dam.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

I'm also not sure that I would take a couple of magazine articles as proof that we can manage all of those at scale. Don't misunderstand, though. I would be very glad to be proven wrong by someone actually implementing these at scale.

It's easy to say "economically" after all and another thing to do it. After all, if power companies can save money doing this, they will.

The description of Scientific American is misleading. Sure, it's technically a "scientific publication," but it's actually a magazine aimed at the layman that you can find at checkout counters and airports -- not a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that one would typically be associated with that term.

To put it in a better perspective, using Scientific American as a source for making decisions on the future of energy would be like using reprinted Associated Press articles to make decisions on US involvement in Libya.

The python 2 code I write might be in use in 20 years time. But I doubt it.

Nuclear reactors built today will still be in use in 60 years time. By which stage, they will be white elephants compared to newer energy sources (I hope).

Yes, "at scale" is succinct and accurate, I will adopt that term too.

"I don't see why we should build even one more plant without the safety planning and preventive measures being an order of magnitude better than they have been so far."

Because then the bids might be too high and they would never get built in the first place? This is probably what happened in Ontario: the requirements for the bids were strict, and the cost of the only one that met it was three times expected. The runner up, from France, was only 10% lower.

Good balanced comment though, thanks.

Personally, I feel this way about everything thrust on humanity. Religion, politics, science - so many ideas are excellent ideas in theory, but when implemented by people, we seem to screw them all up. I suspect this may be our undoing.

>collectively, as a society (or separately, as a bunch of disparate societies), we just might not be mature enough in our thinking to strike the right balance of precaution and preparedness to handle nuclear power as safely as it should be handled.

This was precisely my point. Why the fark CANT we come together over the singularly most important resource modern and future civilization needs, energy.

We humans are really lacking in the high-level critical thought area. For example, we have yet to formalize a civilizations hierarchy of needs. Much like the individual hierarchy of needs set forth by Maslow, all levels of biology have one.

Taking a look at civilizations then, what would be the hierarchy of needs that require nurture, protection, support etc...

I have come up with the following first attempt:

Progress

Organization

Wellbeing

Energy

Resources

Sustenance

First: a civilization needs sustainable methods of feeding itself which is not a net drain on the planet. (potentially combined with Resources)

Second: they need to be able to access, extract/harvest and refine appropriate Resources.

Third: they need to be able to produce and support the energy consumption requirements they have in a similar sustainable manner.

Fourth: They need to be able to provide for the wellbeing of the civilization through both proper physical protections as well as appropriate health care services that are not, themselves, a diseased burden on the energy, resources, or sustenance of the civilization.

Fifth: Proper methods, models and modes of organization are required -- organization of people and the modes by which they communicate and manage the other needs.

Finally: the civilization needs to progress. Review, refine, reinvent.

The problem is that with the Kardashev Scale, there is a fundamental failure to address something akin to a civilizations hierarchy of needs which must be addressed if there is any hope of evolving along this scale.

Using nuclear power as a way to awaken people to this might work.

The problem is that we are completely consumed with individual greed which manifests in the very fabric of our society to such a degree that we cannot even fix the current systems of resource/political/energy control to build consensus around a plan to evolve as a whole.

We are far to in the weeds on every single level of such a hierarchy, pulled with distractions, disinfo and FUD to make real progress.

---

BTW check out these pics of the reactor... I am amazed that it is as good as it is given the state of the reactor buildings. Given the fact that the spent fuel storage were in the TOPS of these structures which we now see lay in practically rubble, leads me to believe that we really do not have any clue where this really will head as we don't have concrete evidence (the outside public, not those really dealing with this) that the materials haven't simply just spilled all over the place.

http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp/daiichi-photos.htm

"Nuclear power is the safest way to make electricity"... so long as you pretend the only other option is fossil fuels.

At scale, right now, those are the only two options.

Well, for that matter, we don't have enough nuclear power production capacity to meet our needs either, so I don't entirely see your point. Reducing the amount of power we're producing with fossil fuels will mean needing to increase our production from other sources, but it doesn't mandate that we have to increase it from a particular source.

My point is that fossil fuels and nuclear power are the only two types that scale efficiently with current technology. Everything else doesn't scale as well. Not sure how else to word that, and that's exactly what I meant up there.

It has nothing to do with current capacity. Nuclear has lost a lot to debates much like this one; however, if we wanted the capacity, nuclear would step up and fill it in at a reasonable price. The same amount of power generated by the alternatives would be astronomically expensive. That's one of the problems that plague the alternatives you've named: either they are far too expensive to use at any kind of large scale, or suitable locations are in thin supply, or power output fluctuates unsuitably with a change in weather, and so on. They just can't compete.

The current research into nuclear is making it even cheaper and safer (thorium, etc); the current research into the alternatives is making them cheap enough to be possible with significant demand.

The reasonable price you talk about doesn't include the cost of disposal. Whatever about providing electricity to be consumed at scale, dealing with radioactive waste has not been successful at small scale, why would it work at large scale? A lot of people display hubris about the merits of the on paper research reactors, what about their unknown unknowns?

* We currently have massive political pressures blocking the production of nuclear reactors. There is no problem in building it, the problem is in the politics.

What are the other options, then?

Hydro-electric, wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, to name the ones that come immediately to mind.

Hydroelectric has the problem that: 1) You're making tens of square kilometers of land uninhabitable by flooding. 2) Such flooding promotes the formation of anaerobic algae which generate thousands of tons of C02 3) Dams collapse too.

Wind cannot provide a stable energy source. The advances required in battery technology and so-called "smart grids" are still too far off. You can't power a steel mill on wind power.

Solar is extremely dependent on location and, once again, requires a power infrastructure overhaul.

Geothermal and tidal are still untested.

All of the mentioned experimental technologies will require at the very least 20 years to mature and will bring their own problems as well (geothermal has the tiny little problem that it causes earthquakes).

Most people don't understand that undertaking an energy infrastructure update is something that takes decades and has to be planned thinking about its effects 30 and 40 years from now. And that also means that while you wait for technologies to mature you have to use stopgaps. Right now there is no alternative for nuclear and there likely won't be for 20 years unless nations are willing to invest hundreds of billions in research and upgrades.

What about hydro on natural waterfalls? No space lost. No dam-failure risk. I don't think every rainy mountain is fully tapped.

True, they aren't everywhere. Maybe some of the power-intensive industry can move to them.

Fortunately people tend to like waterfalls for their aesthetic value so much that they would never allow industrial processing or power plants near them. I would like to see calculations on how much theoretical power could be obtained from all sources if there were no limits, i.e. every river dammed, every waterfall harnessed, every atom of uranium split, every atom of silicon and necessary rare earths turned into solar panels, every acre of desert used in molten salt solar collectors, etc.

Doesn't seem to be a problem and Niagara (2.5GW) or Snoqualmie (54MW). Both are still popular with tourists (obviously, Snoqualmie is not on Niagara's scale in either power or tourism, but I include it because I imagine there are a lot of Snoqualmie-sized waterfalls yet untapped, and probably no Niagara-sized).

I strongly doubt that you can generate more than 0.1% of our power requirements from that source. The world uses 17 trillion kilowatt hours per year, that's 1900 Gigawatts.

None of those can replace coal / nuclear.

EDIT: Here's Bill Gates explaining why nuclear is not optional: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaF-fq2Zn7I

A major problem here is that people often conflate nuclear power plants with nuclear bombs - in people's imaginations nuclear power plants could go up like a bomb and are therefore very dangerous. The fact that this is impossible doesn't get in the way of people's general perception, unfortunately.

Actually looking at the evidence provides a different story altogether - the XKCD radiation chart [1] being one of the most striking examples of the levels of radiation we're talking about here.

It's a pity (though not unexpected) that the media lap up this kind of sentiment despite the fact that hey, our planet is dying, and maybe we need to stop playing around with misconceptions for a second and maybe try and work on fixing this?

I guess our grandchildren will be the ones to find out how this one plays out.

[1]:http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Hey - why the downvote? I know it sounds silly, but I genuinely believe that is a significant part of the general popular view of nuclear power plants, silly or not.

By the way, the destroyed nuclear plant, just like the BP disaster, had avoided government regulation via apathy and corruption in the monitoring process.

So regardless of the supposed engineered safety of any of these extreme measures, once you take out the oversight that is planned into these studies/reports, everything goes out the window.

Everyone needs to state in their claims what will happen when everything fails because no-one bothered to follow up and do what they were supposed to.

"History suggests that nuclear power rarely kills and causes little illness. That’s also the conclusion engineers reach when they model scenarios for thousands of potential accidents."

Auditing nuclear power's extremely short history is not a valid method of assessing risk. In poker they call this 'results oriented thinking'. Especially when discussing black swan events, history is almost by definition not a very useful basis for predictions.

The history is not 'extremely short'. Nuclear has been in operation for decades.

If fact, history inflates the risk by bringing into consideration known weaknesses of earlier reactor designs.

"The history is not 'extremely short'. Nuclear has been in operation for decades."

In the context of highly unlikely events and the mathematics of probability, a period of decades is an extremely small sample. Consider that some of the types of events we are discussing may only happen once in a century. Clearly in this case several decades is not enough to fully gauge what the true risks of nuclear are to humans in the long term. One worst case scenario disaster would tip the scales quite heavily.

I saw this graphic the other day that puts into perspective various sources of radiation exposure (from xkcd, but it's not a joke...) I didn't realize that the lowest levels clearly linked to increased risk of cancer were so high.

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Yes but is it like saying wolves are safer than dogs because statistically your are less likely to be harmed by a wolf than a dog? It ignores the fact that if you do run afoul of a wolf, you are done.

Not quite, because those who actually calculate statistics can account for differences in exposure. For example, the correct statistic to use with wolves and dogs would be something like, "survival rate after pissing off the animal in a similar environment," not just "total number of casualties." With nuclear vs. fossil fuel, the relevant statistic is deaths per terawatt-hour of energy produced, not deaths in total.

IAEA and WHO are notorious for counting only directly attributable deaths. If someone dies from radiation-induced cancer 10 years after in the ripe age of 30-something, it doesn't get in the stats. Then the stats get perpetuated endlessly by nuclear fanboys.

Yeah, that is the most frustrating thing about the arguments from Chernobyl revisionists.

There was no possibility to do all the science that would ideally have been done, everywhere it should have been done. So the anecdotal evidence is often the only evidence--and it is discounted. That is where you get idiotic statements like 'only 28 people died as a result of Chernobyl'. Also, there are many other things that happened to people short of death that nevertheless really sucked, e.g. getting nonfatal thyroid cancer.

There's definitely merit to having a compendium of only rigorous scientific results, of course, but it doesn't help advance the debate (or the species) when such work is mischaracterized and used to promulgate bogus conclusions (much less weird fanboy ideologies).

What about Wave Power? It's pretty safe and has a very minimal environmental impact, almost constant output and for the most part is hidden from eye.

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

Just listened to an interesting podcast about it on Late Night Live:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2011/3176948....

Obviously this wouldn't work for landlocked countries or countries which don't have shores with a constant supply of waves (I'm looking at you Baltic Sea) but for many parts of Africa, the Americas, Australia, Japan, etc, it might just be what we need.

It's interesting, but from what i've seen of it (albiet not all that much), it has two major issues.

* It has a low power density, hence requiring large arrays of collectors/etc. this makes it costly to build at scale.

* It generally either takes up valuable land (land by the sea is costly), or it requires lots of engineering to try and build/maintain these things out to sea.

It is very cool tech though.

The guys on the podcast were saying that the buoy is located 2 km offshore, so not an eyesore as such, though I have not seen one yet, so can't judge.

Seems to be a more reliable solution than wind or solar if it can scale and it is designed to withstand monster waves.

They say they are 3-4 years from deploying real installations (at the moment they have 3 experimental sites).

Yeah, there are a few different types. One sits on shore and uses wave power to compress air, which then runs turbines. This is probably the most efficient method i've seen. There are a few others though, like the buoy method, etc.

Solar is about the most reliable solution you can come across, aside from an RTG mostly because it has no real moving parts and as such has no real way to fail.

What will be interesting is if they manage to up the energy density to the point where it is economical to build.

Certainly the amount of over-confidence, downplaying and sheer denial over the Fukushima incident has been quite astonishing to witness. Repeatedly, pundits of all kinds lined up to insist that the plant was in a safe condition and that everything was under control and that there was no possibility of contamination spreading beyond the plant perimeter. It may take some time before we know the full extent of the environmental damage. If I was living in the north or Japan I'd be extremely concerned about the health effects over the next few years and decades.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining:

"However, in lesser developed countries and some developing countries, many miners continue to die annually, either through direct accidents in coal mines or through adverse health consequences from working under poor conditions. China, in particular, has the highest number of coal mining related deaths in the world, with official statistics claiming that 6,027 deaths occurred in 2004.[19] To compare, 28 deaths were reported in the U.S. in the same year.[20] Coal production in China is twice that in the U.S."

So counting deaths of coal mining from countries were human lives are considered to be expendable resources sounds a bit dishonest. Not that I want to promote coal mining, but I don't trust these PR pieces, sorry.

I think that article also counts accidents from people colliding with coal transporting trains? How is Uranium transported, are there never any collisions?

Also, abandoned mines seem popular for storing nuclear waste. Were the deaths for creating those mines counted towards the nuclear power toll, too?

As for "we don't care about deaths in China", strange enough nuclear power plants tend to be built next to country borders, so that possible pollution has a good chance of blowing into the neighbor's land, not your own. At least that is a story I heard about french nuclear power plants.

Those accidents are mining accidents alone. It ignores black lung, for example.

For the other thing, if that's the actual reason they're locating plants there, I'm against it, for whatever that's worth.

What are you trying to say? I just pointed out that the numbers form the pro-nuclear article are to be taken with a grain of salt. You can always do creative accounting to make look good what you want to look good.

Do the black lung people even die because of it? If not they shouldn't count, just as the cancer patients don't seem to count as long as they don't die in a timely manner.

> You can always do creative accounting to make look good what you want to look good.

Yes, that's why I'm trying to make it clear what all the numbers represent. I believe that you're correct, for example, with China's coal miners having about 4x as much accident risk as US miners, but I think that's still limited to accident risk. I don't remember if Wikipedia explained which figures it was comparing very carefully.

> Do the black lung people even die because of it?

http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray02042010.html

"As dangerous an undertaking as coal mining is, there’s no comparison between the risks of cave-ins or flooding or explosions, and the risks of contracting this deadly disease. In the last decade alone, 10,000 miners have died from black lung, compared with fewer than 400 from mine accidents."

"The ICU mortality rate for patients with coal worker’s pneumoconiosis with their first episode of respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation was 40%, and the in-hospital mortality rate was 43%."

Also look at the treatment tab. Basically, the only treatment is preventative: change jobs (at least get away from the dust!), stop smoking, vaccinations for common lung infections, etc. Oh, yeah, you get put on oxygen, too. It doesn't help your dead lungs, though.

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/297887-treatment

Just a warning, but the pictures in part of that emedicine article are pretty gross.

Downvote me if you want, yet I'm really sad about Hacker News. This is the 4th or 5th pro-nuclear propaganda article up-voted in a couple of weeks. Personally, I'm always sceptical about superlatives.

Yes right ... the safest. Especially, for our children and their children. For everybody who's a proponent of nuclear: If it is so save, why can't you get one insurance company to insure a plant against accidents? And what do we do with the waste? How do we deal it? How do we make it clear for coming civilizations that they are not supposed to dig there etc. as the the waste will stay hazardous for 100,000 years?

Please watch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(documentary)

Is there any other way to make electricity that puts that high of a burden on coming generations? Maybe I'm totally off, yet can effects from coal/water/wind/sun power plants kill people 100 years after they been shut down?

Sure. Global warming can kill people for tens of thousands of years to come.

Newer processes produce no fission products with a half life > 100y. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Thorium_fuel_... Proper reprocessing can dramatically reduce the amount of waste produced, and the toxicity therein.

Just generally, but why would you expect insuring a nuclear plant to be any more painful then insuring a pesticide plant/etc? A leaky pesticide plant can easily wipe a town off the map. A leaky dam can wash away a city with ease.

I mean if you screw up your shale oil extraction you can end up with oil/natural gas leaking in to groundwater for hundreds of k's. Similarly with a burst dam at a gold mine, or....

There are large numbers of things that can cause massive ecological damage. A good number of them are that bad that they arn't ever really reported: http://newsdesk.org/2010/06/niger-delta-oil-spills-dwarf-bp-... as they continue on for years. It's just that some of them are easier to use to sell papers then others.

How's solar and wind power contributing to global warming? Even new, very expensive coal plants are not contributing to global warming :) See: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Schwarze_Pump...

Thorium sounds great, can you tell me how many of the current power plants the new ones planed in the US. will use Thorium? Could not find this information. Is there some plan for proper reprocessing?

I can just talk for Germany, as I'm unfamiliar with the situation in the US or elsewhere. In G. nuclear power plants are not insured, because no insurance company takes the risk. Pesticide plants however are insured and have to pay a lot for their potential risk. So in G. the nuclear power industry gets the profits whereas the risks are shouldered by the citizens (and their ancestors).

It seems to me like Nuclear is the safest form of energy in the short term - very few people die per gigawatt hour, if you will. But in the long term I'm still not entirely convinced - we've only had nuclear power for a few decades, but the waste is going to stick around for a lot longer than that, so calling it "safe" on the basis of a very small amount of data relative to the whole time we'll be affected by them seems...premature.

That said, we could solve a lot of the problems - and even get rid of existing waste - by switching to newer reactor designs that are, among other things, much safer.

Fat chance of that happening, at least in this country. We're just to firmly wed to what is essentially a generation of outdated reactor designs.

Yeah, currently the spent fuel is piling up.

You need one a more large reprocessing sites and one or more storage sites.

Currently the nuclear industry is running without it.

I was at a physics lecture about Fukushima given two weeks ago at the University of Cape Town. Here are some facts you may or may not know:

1. The event of a serious nuclear catastrophe is 1 in every 10000 years per nuclear plant.

2. There are between 400-500 nuclear plants in the world.

3. That means we can expect 1 Chernobyl or worse every 20 years.

4. When these events happen, the consequences last forever, it takes tens of thousands of years for the land to recover.

5. That means within 500 years, if the number of nuclear plants stays constant (at 500), we would have at least 25 city-sized exclusion zones around the world.

6. These numbers only include nuclear power plants, they don't include nuclear subs, warheads etc.

7. These numbers exclude future advances in nuclear reliability though they may only be asymptotic (Pareto). Most of the advances have likely been made already.

8. If we were to increase our nuclear power output, so as to be less reliant on coal, they reckon we would need to double the number of nuclear power plants.

9. That means we can now expect 1 Chernobyl or worse every 10 years.

10. That means within 500 years, if the number of nuclear plants stays constant (at 1000), we would have at least 50 city-sized exclusion zones around the world.

11. When a Chernobyl or worse happens, the fallout covers entire continents, leading to a number of indirectly attributable deaths from thyroid cancer and other cancers.

12. These probabilities are based on pure physics, they do not factor in negligence on the part of humans, tiredness, lack of funding, depreciation of plant, government intervention, mismanagement etc. For instance in South Africa, at the Koeberg nuclear plant, a loose bolt accidentally destroyed a power generator, and last year in September, 91 workers were accidentally exposed to very low doses of radiation (this was not widely reported to the media, and it is not clear that an investigation was ever conducted into the matter).

13. Coal plants and mining plants leak radiation on a daily basis.

14. Our parents teach us not to play with fire. Yet fire, when handled with respect and care, is a powerful technology.

15. Nuclear power, is also a fire, and a powerful technology, but it is an "eternal" fire. When a nuclear disaster occurs, the consequences are forever.

16. It is a question of asymmetric odds. The event of a disaster is remote. It is so remote that the apparatus of our human mind finds it difficult to comprehend. These events do happen, and when they do, they must be amortized over thousands of generations.

17. Only a fool would play Russian roulette at 6-1 odds. Long Term Capital Management included minds of Nobel Prize calibre, yet they played it with better odds and lost. Then they tried again under a different name and lost. That didn't stop them from trying yet a third time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management

18. LTCM played the game of asymmetric odds on behalf of a fund of investors. Are we prepared to play it on behalf of generations? Even thousands of generations yet to be born? Do we have the right?

18. If it were a question of pure physics, then Nuclear power may appear to be safe and controllable. But it is also a question of people, of incentives, business deals, governments, and of consequences over future generations for which we have no right to take responsibility. We need a safe and simple power (or a combination of these).

19. The trouble with Nuclear power (and I say this as someone who was once a naive supporter) is that there are too many variables. There are hundreds of variables within the realm of physics and there are hundreds more outside. We know from other disciplines, that humans (no matter how smart) are simply just not good enough at controlling variables like that.

20. We cannot trust our models to control these things for us. Some models are more useful than others, but ultimately our models fail, whether they be Newtonian physics, or Black Scholes, that is what makes them models, they are approximations of the data that we have at hand. The question is whether we can deal with the situations that arise when our models fail us. A financial meltdown? A plane crash? A destruction of a city for tens of thousands of years?

I'm from Germany and I'm supporting our move to 100% renewable electricity production by 2050 or earlier.

It will be interesting to see what the US does.

Let's say coal and gas are much more dangerous than nuclear and nuclear is the way to go.

Let's also say renewables is not a way to go, because many people die from erecting wind mills, bio mass plants and solar panels. Chemicals for solar panel production are dirty and rare earth minerals need to be mined, too.

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

Currently 20% of electricity in the US is generated with nuclear power stations. There are around 100 in operations. Many of them are extremely old and some even sit in dangerous regions with earth quakes. Let's say 20 of them have to be shutdown soon.

68% of the electricity are provided by coal (45%) and gas (23%) power plants. That is 3.4 times more electricity.

Now the US is going to replace the dangerous and dirty coal and gas with nuclear.

So you need around new 250 nuclear reactors to phase out coal and gas. Maybe less, because newer nuclear reactors generate more electricity. Maybe more, because the electricity demand may rise.

Let's say a nuclear power plant and its direct infrastructure will cost around 5 billion a piece, that would be 1.25 trillion $. That sounds much, but given that the US spends a trillion a year on 'defense', it might not be much. May be the price will go down with production of 100 and more reactors.

Given that the political parties may want to have small government, the majority of the nuclear reactors will have to be financed and operated by companies.

So the tasks are:

* find a way to finance one or two trillion dollars

* decide and standardize on a new reactor design with inherent safety

* build up companies who will plan, build and operate the nuclear reactors

* find places for 250 new reactors (in addition to the existing 100)

* build, say, three reprocessing plants for those

* build, say, three breeder reactors

* find, say, three storage sites for nuclear waste

* get mining and an fuel enrichment going

The result would be about 85% electricity production with nuclear reactors and complete phase out of gas and coal power plants.

What is the time scale for this? The full development of a new type of reactor can be done in, say, 10 years. Add dealing with regulations, tests, ... - one may need 20 years. Let's be optimistic and say ten. A new reprocessing plant, would need, say, 10 years. A new storage site, say, 30 years.

So in the first ten years no reactor would be ready. That's pessimistic, since there might be reactor designs that can be built earlier - it is optimistic, since a really new design may need more time. Also the US has not built commercial reactors for some time, so there is some time needed to get this going again.

* 1st. decade, zero power plants

* 2nd. decade, ten power plants + a reprocessing site

* 3rd. decade, thirty power plants + another reprocessing site

* 4th decade, fifty new power plants + another reprocessing site, plus a new storage site

* 5th decade, 100 new power plants + a new storage site

* 6th decade, 100 new power plants

Result: new 290 nuclear power plants, 3 reprocessing sites, and two long term storage sites.

This would also allow to shut down some of the older ones.

These are just assumptions.

That's basically what France did, now scaled to the US. France has 65 million people and less electricity usage per person. The US is now at 300+ Million people. That's around 4.5 times more. France operates around 50 nuclear power plants. So, 350 in total in the US needed would be a good assumption (given some constraints, like that France is very centralized and many people live around Paris). France also has a shrinking population, where the US is still growing - last I looked.

> France also has a shrinking population, where the US is still growing - last I looked.

Remark: France has a growing population, and one of the highest birth rate in Europe.

> 100% renewable electricity production by 2050 or earlier

Do you know anywhere I could read about the specific plans for this? I assume lots more wind turbines are a big part of it.

I buy green power from Vattenfall, and I know at the moment most of it is hydroelectric imported from Norway.

If you can read German you find it here:

http://www.uba.de/uba-info-medien-e/3997.html

and here:

http://www.umweltdaten.de/publikationen/fpdf-l/3997.pdf

Perfect! I live in Germany, but I'm not a citizen, so my political engagement is usually somewhat limited.

I'll take a closer look later, but the short answer seems to be "everything". Mostly solar everywhere and wind in the countryside and offshore, but also hydro, geothermal, and biomass.

> I'm from Germany and I'm supporting our move to 100% renewable electricity production by 2050 or earlier.

Do people in Norway whose natural environment you're altering on a grand scale by buying their renewable hydropower feel the same? Will they feel the same in 2050?

What is difficult to reconcile is that we all know that nuclear meltdowns are catastrophic events, that the resultant fallout/radioactive contamination is utterly horrible.

Yet it seems that we dont build reactors with the types of failsafe systems that truly are needed should meltdown occur.

Obviously this reactor is old, and was not built during a time when we really knew what a meltdown looked like in real life. After Chernobyl, and now Fukishima, I think we really really really need to look at what the failsafe systems, containment, backup cooling and other system requirements really need to be.

Should we build reactors only in D.U.M.B. like facilities? Should we build them in old open-pit mines, such that they could be entombed properly.

Have we put enough research into containment facilities such that their structures will not melt?

I know that these faciliies have multiple backups, but clearly even then we can have situations where they dont work. Yes, this was a trifecta of incredibly fantastic circumstance, but it still happened and we are now dealing with a shitstorm.

Watching the documentary last night about how the earthquake dropped the coastline of japan upto 1 meter in elevation resulting in the sea-walls being 1 meter less than the tsunami - and the fact that clearly we know that tsunamis would occur there - placing a 6 reactor facility ON THE COAST LINE seems pretty damn stupid at this point.

It's like "Nuclear energy is the safest energy there is, until its not!"

I am all for nuclear -- but its current incarnation is rife with the traditional corrupt bullshit that plagues all other human endeavors; politics.

Why do we not have a global energy task force whose singular job it is is to plan, produce and protect the worlds energy?

If we had an organization whose sole charter was to produce energy, and was funded based on the economies of all the worlds countries - and energy was metered out to all countries in a responsible way -- we could be much further along to becoming a unified space-faring race....

/rant

Why do we not have a global energy task force whose singular job it is is to plan, produce and protect the worlds energy?

Large parts of the world actually tried this, not just for their energy needs but for all other goods and services, too. It doesn't actually work that way in reality.

I understand. However - I am curious - energy is the fundamental resource we now are 100% dependent upon for survival. Obviously the energy industry knows this , thus the fact that they have successfully staged a coup on global politics.

I do find it interesting though, that there is not really any apolitical/civilian organizations that seek to guide/set/create global energy policy. I mean real apolitical orgs - not a shill think-tank such as CFR BS.

God I'm getting cynical.

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