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Comment by andys627 | Hacker News Reader

Just remember that the greenest kilowatt hour is the kilowatt hour never produced.

> Just remember that the greenest kilowatt hour is the kilowatt hour never produced.

Not only it is like saying the safest human is a dead human, it is also wrong. We can easily harvest energy for our human endevours and put a portion of that into “good” use including keeping and even making more things green.

What we are currently having is a game theoretic policy problem, not an inherent law of thermodynamics. And I don’t think sloganeering will help us overcome that, because appeal to emotions won’t convince China or India to not increase their cheap, non-green energy flow while they are also experiencing their largest economic expansion. (Not saying they are solely responsible of course, but they drive the trend in increase)

Green is great, but probably the most moral kilowatt is that both green (as in accounts for the environmental load, so it minimizes eco-debt that future humans would have to "pay back") and maximizes current humans' needs, eg. powers homes, schools, hospitals where currently there millions live without stable electricity.

Personally I dream of the day that we are a galaxy spanning species consuming the energy equivalent of a lifetime of our sun every couple of days. I think net energy consumption is a decent measuring stick for how advanced a society is.

I'm also all for sustainability. We aren't going to reach the stars if our home planet collapses before we get there.

Energy efficiency is also important. Otherwise, you will lose galaxies worth of energy without even an opportunity to use.

Except in the case of solar, the energy has already been produced by the sun and we are failing to capture it and put it to good use

Of those produced, statistically, nuclear is both cleanest and safest [1]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Until nuclear waste is taken into account (specifically, its radiotoxicity).

Much of the issue with the waste is that it still doesn't have proper disposal logistics. It's mostly just piling up next to reactors with no place to go.[1] If we still can't solve the storage problem after decades of effort, why should we have any confidence in promises made by that particular industry? [2] If one goes to search for information on the problem, you can see some very obvious SEO manipulation to bring up only industry-positive sites.

1. https://www.npr.org/2019/04/30/716837443/as-nuclear-waste-pi...

2. https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/department-of-energy-nu...

It's not really industry that failed here but rather the government that imposed a tax for a service that was never rendered and whose revenues were later squandered.

For the sake of clarity, and because it's your primary point, I do think it's worth to point out even in the article you cite nuclear is the cleanest, but safety depends on how you perform the estimate.

I found the comparisons in analysis they performed here: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#why-do-b... interesting. One estimate results in nuclear being more deadly per TwH produced than wind, hydro, and solar (about 2-3x), and the other results in it being less deadly by the same amount. It is important to note that a significant portion of deaths from nuclear seem to come from a few large events; with this in mind, one study includes Fukushima, and the other includes Chernobyl. [1]

A larger factor in the discrepancy is one study's very conservative estimate of "deaths from occupational effects", which I interpret as the net added risk versus background from radiation exposure for all workers involved in the maintenance and fueling of the plant. The true relationship between radiation exposure and death risk seems to be under dispute: the more conservative estimate now appears to be an overestimate because it assumes a linear relationship, while the article states consensus is shifting towards a threshold model where one assumes that very low exposure to radiation (the type of exposure most nuclear plant workers experience, I presume?) does not increase cancer risk.

[1] perhaps this is an instance of a more general difficulty in statistics: that of estimating the mean of heavy-tailed distributions (see e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.04280.pdf). I'd guess that deaths from nuclear events follow a heavy-tailed distribution, which implies the mean could not be a good estimate of the true impact. But as I have not actually taken the time to investigate the analysis of nuclear deaths performed in the studies, I can't say how well existing analyses do this.

Yeah, but go tell the people in Fukushima.

And keep in mind that Japanese people are usually religiously meticulous about work, procedures and safety.

And still remains the problem of radioactive toxic waste.

Edit: I don't want to underplay your comment, but it's important to understand that when dealing with nuclear power all it takes is one major fuck-up to completely screw a whole region.

I grew up near Chernobyl and my parents still work on CNPP. So, I understand a thing or two about nuclear disasters

People love to compare renewables built last week, with nuclear power plants from the era when rivers used to routinely catch on fire.

They aren't likely to stop, either. It's vexing, but there's not a lot that can be done about it.

Modern (gen 3 and plus) reactors are remarkably safe with waste being not a big problem either ...

My main point is that the problem of waste from modern reactors is about the same as managing waste from solar panels, probably is even easier since it is concentrated in few locations and there is not much of it.

They meticulously put the standby generators in the basement, where they got flooded out.

The plant was designed for Kansas, where they'd be safe in the basement from tornados. But in Japan they should have been moved to higher ground.

Whole new application of "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."

Unfunded externalities.

Tell that to fossil fuel and renewable biomass, which cause 8 million deaths/yr from air pollution and also cause climate change. Compared to that, nuclear is astronomically cheaper in the externality dept.

Your own link seems to show hydro, solar and wind power as being safer. The conclusion after the chart though ignores those and compares only nuclear and fossil fuels. As far as pollution, the article seemed to again compare only fossil fuels vs nuclear.

True, but no other energy source has a mode of failure that makes swathes of land unusable for essentially forever.

But the main argument against nuclear is "organisational" so to speak.

For some reason nowadays the more liberal a country is, the less success it has in rolling out nuclear.

Perhaps it's the additional incentive of being able to reprocess waste for weapons that's so alluring.

Fossil makes wastelands via climate change. We get 80% of our energy from fossil. The nuclear wasteland thing is largely a myth propagated by those who say that even natural background levels of radiation are deadly. Nevermind that there are places in the world (e.g. in Iran, Brazil, and India) with ~50x higher natural background with lots of people living there who are just fine.

https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...

No that's water-energy, and funny...it's just not on the first graph from your link, something is really not right with those data s hydro-power have higher emissions than Solar and wind?

With nuclear....that's the dirty part of it:

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

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