After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform | Hacker News Reader

After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

forbes.com

539 pointselsewhen471 comments

For the uninitiated, nuclear power is actually much, much safer than it was in the previous century, and fossil fuel power plants have killed exponentially more people through pollution than all nuclear power accidents combined – it's just not something that happens all at once so it doesn't seem like a big deal to most people.

We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future generations without mass adoption of nuclear power.

> Nuclear energy is by far the safest energy source in this comparison – it results in more than 442 times fewer deaths than the 'dirtiest' forms of coal; 330 times fewer than coal; 250 times less than oil; and 38 times fewer than gas.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Partly I think nuclear triggers a cognitive bias where humans will tolerate ongoing low-level shittiness, but really struggle with large catastrophes, even if the catastrophe is far less damaging than the ongoing low-level damage.

However, I think the resistance is also because the nature of the catastrophe is different. Have coal or gas plants ever created a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone? I know that mining/drilling are incredibly damaging to the environment, but theoretically work is done to mitigate/restore the areas. Of course, they're essentially turning the entire planet (or large, currently-inhabited swaths of it anyway) into an exclusion zone, but unfortunately there is another cognitive bias humans have where we under-rate long-term risks.

I've been a nuclear skeptic, but gradually I'm coming around to it. At this point the main questions I have are whether it can be done cheap enough. It seems like price is really driving renewable adoption at this point, so maybe green policies should focus on subsidizing storage and nuclear instead?

Burning coal creates fly ash which needs to be stored somewhere, usually large ponds near the power plant. In Tennessee in 2008 a dike ruptured and released 1.1 billion gallons of coal fly ash slurry that flowed into nearby rivers that drained into the Tennessee River. No-one was injured in the initial spill, but people contracted to clean it up developed cancers from being exposed to the toxic coal ash, 300 people died within 10 years after the accident.

It is considered the largest industrial spill in US history.

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

You’re off by an order of magnitude. More than 30 of the roughly 900 workers employed during the seven-year cleanup of the nation’s largest manmade environmental disaster are dead (https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/crime/2018/12/22/kingsto...)

As stated that not that unusual. At 45 a man has a 0.3285% chance of death per year at 55 that bumps to 0.7766%. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html 3 deaths per year out of 900 works out to 0.3333%. So, depending on the age of workers that’s anything for fairly normal to low.

Worth noting that this power plant was run by an arm of the United States government.

>Partly I think nuclear triggers a cognitive bias where humans will tolerate ongoing low-level shittiness, but really struggle with large catastrophes, even if the catastrophe is far less damaging than the ongoing low-level damage.

How come hydroelectric dams don't get treated this way? In 2019 a dam in Brazil had a catastrophic failure that cost the lives of 270 people. In 2019! In 1975 a dam failed in China and the death toll is estimated between 80,000 and 240,000.

All of this ignores the ecosystem destruction that building a dam and flooding a valley does. All of that plant life will die and the carbon goes back into the cycle.

Yet I don't see hydroelectric dams getting nearly as much push back from activists. Why?

Hydro disasters have been large, but are tangible/sensible, immediate, and resolve relatively quickly (days for rescue, months for recovery, possibly a few years for rebuilding).

Banqiao is now home to 17 million people (after 40 years, largely achieved within a decade or so). Meantime, Chernobyl still hasn't seen complete containment (after 34 years), and Fukushima hasn't begun initial cleanup (after 9 years). The two nuclear sites will be obligatory nature preserves for centuries, containing still-lethal risks.

The specific failings at Banqiao were virtually all managerial and political, not technical; poor engineering, inadequate safety provisions, underestimated environmental and operational risks, poor contingency planning, unforseen perfect storm (literally), severed communications, insufficient warnings, no community disaster preparation, inadequate rescue and recovery. None of these failures are specific to hydro, all apply to nuclear power, and as non-engineering problems there is no technical fix that makes them go away.

In Banqiao, about 25,000 people died in the immediate innundation. Another 150,000 died in the following weeks of starvation and disease. There's no great mystery as to how such deaths are avoided: floodwaters are mitigated by high ground and evacuation centres; starvation and disease by food, water, and medical stocks; and rescue & recovery by trained teams and equipment. Reestablishment of communications, transport, and utilities is critical.

China at the time was desperately poor, politically dysfunctional, and gambled hugely on risk and lost. Other major hydro disasters tend to share these traits.

As do many regions looking to nuclear power for salvation.

(I've mentioned Banqiao several times over the years on HN. It's a terrifying but educational tragedy. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Wikipedia article recommended: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam))

> How come hydroelectric dams don't get treated this way? In 2019 a dam in Brazil had a catastrophic failure that cost the lives of 270 people.

Brumadinho wasn't a hydroelectric dam; it was a dam containing leftovers from iron mining (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumadinho_dam_disaster for details). Apparently, this kind of dam has a very different design from hydroelectric dams (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailings_dam, "Unlike water retention dams, a tailings dam is raised in succession throughout the life of the particular mine.").

I've wondered about this for years, crossing off theories like you just did with powerful counterexamples.

All I see left is technophobia.

There's a deep human bias. Things we don't understand seem scarier than things we do.

People get how a dam works, the basics anyway. They understand how a car crashes or why it's bad when the pump in your chest stops beating.

They do not like radiation at all. They do not like strange chemicals. They do not like robots driving cars.

They want dangers they can understand, even if that increases the risk substantially.

But they do.

Hydroelectric dams are huge infrastructure projects, and they're almost impossible to build these days because of political concerns with huge public pushback. France and Finland have built nuclear reactors recently. When was their last hydro dams built?

China got huge pushback from both environmental and human rights organizations with diplomatic tensions. Ethopia is on the brink of war because of their huge hydro project.

Most people don't live near downstream of hydros, to them water is just water, but nuclear is ~~scary~~ stuff

Has the Gulf of Mexico recovered from deepwater horizon? How many ecosystems were lost permanently? Animals living in the exclusion zone have a life expectancy 30% lower than those in the surrounding area (based on the last paper I read about the topic) so it's not an acceptable risk for humans but it's still peanuts compared to the damage that single spill did to the Gulf ecosystem.

It's an extension of the cognitive bias you point out. Just because we humans find the area too risky to inhabit afterwards doesn't mean that the damage made a meaningful impact on the survivability of our planet.

> Have coal or gas plants ever created a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone?

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

Maybe not a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone, but its devastating a town and the fire will be ongoing for 250-years.

It definitely seems like most people are dismissive of this point because they think technology has somehow advanced to the point where we will never be able to have accidents.

I think you have a point that the drama of evacuating a city sears nuclear disasters into our minds as uniquely damaging.

At the same time, single mining disasters have caused hundreds of deaths many times over the last century. Also, black lung killed 25,000 people in 2013 alone. The death toll from the coal industry, even in very immediate, direct terms, is still higher than nuclear.

Existing already-operating nuclear plants can barely compete with cheap fracked gas in the United States. Capital investment in new nuclear is never going to pencil for a private operator without carbon taxes or enormous price drops.

The existing regulatory structure for nuclear power was designed for the previous generation of reactors. I don’t have deep knowledge in this area, but it’s clear to me that more modern designs have very different risk profiles, and the regulatory structure should change to reflect that. This should reduce the compliance cost, which is a very large portion of the initial and operational costs of nuclear power.

In short - nukes are expensive now because they’re an extremely regulated industry. New designs are much safer and new regulation for them should therefore have much lower compliance costs.

Instead of a carbon tax, the government should simply treat gas similar to what many governments did before to nuclear. Forbid the construction of new ones, and let the planned life expectancy of existing plants be final.

When they did that to nuclear it worked wonders in getting people to invest. After all, people then knew that there would be vacant spots in the energy market at very predictable dates. Telling a market that in X year there will be Y amount of demand not being fulfilled, and a main competitor gone, and someone will want to fill it. The price will be based on how cheap the non-fossil fueled alternatives can be made when competing against each other.

Another part is that people are distrustful, especially when previous promises were broken, and as far as I know, before each major accident (Chernobyl, Fukushima) happened, it was said that such an accident can never happen.

That brings into doubt any promise of future safety.

No one except the Soviet Union said the Chernobyl style plants were reasonable designs. That kind of design would have been illegal to build anywhere else in the world.

No one ever promised that there would never be a nuclear accident - that would be unrealistic for any power source. But historically nuclear power has been safer than all the alternatives that were available. (For example, nuclear power has saved hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives that would have been lost if coal plants had been built instead.)

never say never, seriously.

But also can you point to a WW1 plane and say "you see, planes are unsafe"? Chernobyl was designed in the early days of nuclear energy.

> Have coal or gas plants ever created a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone?

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

>Have coal or gas plants ever created a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone?

Coal extraction has created far more land where you can't drink the well water and probably would be unwise to eat any plants or animals raised on the land.

Ongoing shittiness is predictable and easy to understand. We've survived so far, surely we can survive if it gets just a little worse. Big disasters are unpredictable and hard to understand. One of those could end the world at any time. AFAICT that's the whole reason people are more afraid of them.

> Big disasters are unpredictable and hard to understand. One of those could end the world at any time.

In the context of nuclear reactors, Fukushima and Chernobyl are pretty much the worst case scenario. A large nuclear disaster is very disruptive to the immediate area but it would not "end the world" in any sense.

Well said. I had a small version of this debate with someone I know who posts political stuff on FB, who pointed out in absolutist fashion that the poor failure modes of nuclear and the regular emissions from dirtier sources are both bad, and we need something without either downside.

Literally true but has a bit of "perfect as the enemy of the good" to it. I know absolutely nothing about the challenges involved in updating existing infrastructure to a different source but it seems like an immense challenge, and not at all black and white.

>> it seems like price is really driving renewable adoption at this point.

Another article fresh from Wired about the aging solar panel mess and the toxic waste they're leaving behind:

Solar panels are an increasingly important source of renewable power that will play an essential role in fighting climate change. They are also complex pieces of technology that become big, bulky sheets of electronic waste at the end of their lives—and right now, most of the world doesn’t have a plan for dealing with that.

But we’ll need to develop one soon, because the solar e-waste glut is coming. By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don’t cut it for solar panels. Recovering the most valuable materials from one, including silver and silicon, requires bespoke recycling solutions. And if we fail to develop those solutions along with policies that support their widespread adoption, we already know what will happen.

https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...

People seem to think solar and wind and electric power don't come with equally damaging aspects to the environment.

Remember in the 1970's and 80's when people thought plastic was the greatest thing on earth? We can save the trees now!! People started using plastic for everything. People stopped using paper bags at grocery stores. People opted for Tupperware instead of glass bowls and containers and on and on. We all thought we were saving the world by using plastic for everything.

Apparently we were dead wrong about plastic and not look at what we've sown? Huge plastic floating islands in the oceans. Plastic debris washing ashore on distant islands, killing the entire ecosystems.

Price is all good and fine, but the long term ramifications of renewable energy we still don't know about.

The pollution from solar panels is absolutely miniscule compared to the pollution produced by fossil fuel power. By a gigantic margin.

Gas no, but coal and other burning based fuels create similar hazards, in addition to nasty waste products and mining related pollution.

Coal spreads radioactive ash and various noxious chemicals. In my area of the country, many lakes were “killed” by coal related pollution from the Midwest in the 70s and 80s, for example.

Nuclear waste disposal is a real issue that needs to be deal with, but overall the technology has potential to be much better than it is today.

You hit on a really important point here, the notion of "dread risk"[1]. The public tends to poorly characterize and amortize the different degrees of risk associated with different activities, due to biases in how we perceive the risk of extreme or rare events. Simply running the numbers, it's far more likely for the average American to die in a car accident (or even, probably a plane accident, even given how rare they are!) than for the same person to ever be impacted by a nuclear meltdown, or a terrorist attack, etc. And yet, NIMBY-ism runs rampant while there are quite active political voices which argue against mandating seatbelts (I guess less so in the year 2020), helmets for motorcyclists, etc.

[1]: Slovic, 1987. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/236/4799/280

Sure. Centralia PA is now uninhabitable because of coal mining and on a smaller scale you’ve got things like the TVA fly ash spill that caused widespread environmental damage.

I think it's even simpler:

People tie nuclear power to nuclear bombs. They think, consciously or subconsciously, that they're some kind of slowed down nuclear explosions, and one day there will be a mushroom cloud turning the area into glass.

Yeah, the experts say it can't happen, but how do we know they're not arrogant Jurassic Park style fools?

> However, I think the resistance is also because the nature of the catastrophe is different. Have coal or gas plants ever created a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone?

Indirectly, yes. I think that rising sea levels due to climate change effectively does the same thing by making once-habitable coastal areas effectively uninhabitable.

> Partly I think nuclear triggers a cognitive bias where humans will tolerate ongoing low-level shittiness, but really struggle with large catastrophes, even if the catastrophe is far less damaging than the ongoing low-level damage.

Much like how low level corruption can be absolutely devastating to a democracy over time versus a high profile scandal or two which can be dealt with with urgency and clearer solutions.

Apparently it's all in the marketing. See: the current US response to Covid-19.

I would say that Florida is essentially a Chernobyl style exclusion zone, except that Chernobyl is actually a pretty nice place now.

I'm all for nuclear but the safety record talk always seems disingenuous or at least obtuse to me when the stats focus on day to day operations but the fears are about worst case scenarios.

I also feel like the industry would do better if it rallied behind specific new technologies so politicians could rally behind molten salt reactors (or what have you) and placate fears about "old nuclear" designs.

It's important to distinguish current rates and worst case scenario rates, but the worst case scenario rate for fossil fuels is astronomical as well.

Not just worst case scenario "rates", but the scenarios themselves. What is the worst case scenario from a completely unmitigated core meltdown versus whatever the most extreme failure mode of, say, a coal plant?

Pollution from coal power kills about a million per year, and that's not counting accidents. I don't know why you'd want a "completely unmitigated meltdown," but even if terrorists rent a 747, hoist an active reactor, and drop it onto the middle of Manhattan, it will kill less than the non-failure mode of coal plants during the same year.

The worst case scenario from fossil fuels is not failure at a coal power plant. Even mining coal is more dangerous, and deaths directly from coal pollution dwarf mining accidents. But the worst case scenario is climate change that strongly affects hundreds of millions to billions of lives. Depending on location, it would take many "unmitigated core meltdowns" at nuclear power plants to have a similar effect.

I would say it apocalyptic.

> but the safety record talk always seems disingenuous

This is WHY I support nuclear, because of their safety record. All the people in all the nuclear accidents (or usage) ever that have died is far less than the yearly death from coal or oil or natural gas. As a death per TWhr it is even lower than solar[0]. So I'm a bit confused by the safety concerns. Having worked with nuclear materials, the reason it is so safe is because the safety levels are set to be much stricter than other energy sources, and by a lot. We've seen coal, fracking, and mining all create zones that won't be habitable for thousands of years.

Now we have reactors that produce thousands of times less waste than previous generation reactors. But you should also consider that the amount of nuclear waste is tiny. Over the last 60 years, the estimated total (radioactive and non-radioactive) waste is estimated to be about 445k tons[1] (324k tons need to be stored). In 2014 the US (just the US) produced 130m (that's million) tons of coal ash[2]. We're talking astronomically big differences in waste size. If we do a basic naive comparison that's coal _in the US_ is producing 18 _thousand_ times as much waste per year than the _global waste_ from nuclear. This is RIDICULOUS.

Saying "nuclear produces more waste and/or more damage to the environment and/or people" just signals one not paying attention to the damage caused by other resources. Sure, nuclear is scary, but the data says it is one of the safest, cleanest, and best sources of energy for our environment. And that's why people get up in arms about it, because the data is there and easy to find. And unfair comparisons are being made left and right.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-total-amount-of-nuclear-wa...

[2] https://www.epa.gov/coalash/coal-ash-basics

> All the people in all the nuclear accidents (or usage) ever that have died is

There is no consensus about it.

Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

This is more like saying that there's no consensus about climate change. Sure, there are people that disagree, but it is small. And to quote the wiki you posted (from the opening)

> The book was not peer reviewed by the New York Academy of Sciences.Five reviews were published in the academic press, with four of them considering the book severely flawed and contradictory, and one praising it while noting some shortcomings.

I wish one person who mentioned the long game would also mention that nuclear accidents can make a place uninhabitable for thousands of years.

If I had a dollar for every time a pro-nuclear person (not that I'm not) ignored that, or peak uranium...

Just look at Japan, most of the region around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has actually been reopened to the public already:

> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/07/20/national/beach-...

> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/04/05/national/evacue...

Looking at the radiation levels, most places are already back to save levels:

> https://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/portal-english/en02-01...

You have to keep in mind that nuclear contamination can actually be washed off. And the radiation is actually very useful in the cleaning process because you can easily use a detector to safely determine whether your cleaning operation was successful.

Even Chernobyl is mostly safe these days unless you stay at the hotspots for too long.

> Even Chernobyl is mostly safe these days unless you stay at the hotspots for too long.

You could say the exact same thing about a house fire.

Neither Fukushima nor Chernobyl were worst-case-scenario.

> nuclear accidents can make a place uninhabitable for thousands of years.

Ignoring the fact that meltdown is not even possible in modern designs, even in a Fukushima total power loss scenario, note that the Bikini atoll is safe to visit at this point and it was the site of repeated nuclear testing. It's hard to see how nuclear power plants, which are designed to avoid any possibility of having a critical mass, could do worse than what was done to the atoll. So becoming uninhabitable for "thousands of years" would pretty difficult, even if someone were trying to do that intentionally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll#Current_habitable...

> peak uranium...

And what of peak oil then? Didn't that happen already?

Also, what's the alternative? We stop using energy to make ammonium, let agriculture scale down to nothing, and leave people starving as food production plummets?

There's only so much of a solar energy budget for the planet, then we have to get it from off world (with transport costs) or use up consumable sources already on the planet like coal, nuclear, etc. The universe loses the fight with entropy eventually no matter what we do, the only question is how long we last.

I would like to hear more about "nuclear meltdowns not even possible." You mean on designs that people are actually talking about implenting, or just the state-of-the-art stuff that we are nowhere close to implementing, especially in poorer nations?

Nuclear weapon use in the atmosphere, especially when not near-ground, is orders of magnitude cleaner than reactor accidents. A few hundred kg vs. tens of tons of isotopes released.

> Ignoring the fact that meltdown is not even possible in modern designs

You realize this claim (of molten salt reactors) is mostly untrue, right?

It's true in the sense that the reactor itself can be drained into a drain tank, but this itself remains highly radioactive and liable to leakage.

It also produces radioactive Tritium which is difficult to contain.

See https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Molten_salt_reactor#...

https://www.powermag.com/blog/molten-salt-reactor-claims-mel...

> There's only so much of a solar energy budget for the planet, then we have to get it from off world

I think the 5 billion years until that is projected to happen gives us a little bit of time to work on solutions.

Did you just slippery-slope all the way to entropy? I agree with you and I'm "on your side" in the inane political sense. Just acknowledging the drawbacks.

> nuclear accidents can make a place uninhabitable for thousands of years

Note that this is not special to nuclear materials; it's true for a good chunk of industrial chemistry in general as well.

> peak uranium

I'll need to look up some more up-to-date numbers, but going by https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_162.shtml, there's more than enough for couple centuries (and new reactor designs can make one-two orders of magnitude better use of what's available).

But even if we only had 100 years worth of nuclear fuel reserve, that's more than enough to fix the climate problem and fully develop renewables (possibly including orbital collectors). Or who knows, maybe even fusion.

Every time I've seen one of these threads on HN asserting that nuclear is safer than the alternatives and I've looked more closely into the claims, I've wound up unconvinced because of omissions like the one you've identified. It's gotten to the point that I tend to tune out pro-nuclear arguments on HN. :( I'm sure there are good arguments in there somewhere, but I don't have the bandwidth to sort them out from the misleading ones.

> I wish one person who mentioned the long game would also mention that nuclear accidents can make a place uninhabitable for thousands of years.

Meanwhile burning fossil fuels as designed is going to make the entire planet uninhabitable. It's already unsafe to eat seafood very often because of the mercury content. Smog blankets many cities causing numerous health issues. I haven't even touched on global warming yet...

Anti-nuclear people like to ignore the fact that the status quo _will_ result in many equatorial regions being uninhabitable for thousands of years.

What does it mean to say that fossil fuel plants killed exponentially more people?

Isn’t this just the triviality that any two points (with different y values) are exponentially related?

Yeah, usage of the phrase "exponentially more" is widespread and always almost meaningless. It drives me crazy, especially as a CS theory person, where this phrase has a precise meaning.

It's gone the way of "literally"

I believe the intended meaning is “orders of magnitude more.”

It’s the common colloquial usage of “exponential” to mean “a lot”, rather than its technical meaning.

It basically is used in the same way "only a fraction of the populace supports the measure" just in the opposite direction of meaning. Both expressions have technical shortcomings; but are idiomatically understood.

Let’s just say it means many, many, many more deaths.

I wish nuclear advocates would stop selectively quoting to try to hide things. Almost no one wants to continue with fossil fuels, and instead the competition is renewable. "This comparison" mentioned in that quote doesn't include renewables (it was from 2007) but from the very same page, in the very next section:

> Modern renewables are about as safe as nuclear energy

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#modern-r...

But you cannot use 100% renewable energy without some storage technology not currently known. Nuclear is the only carbon free energy source we have that can supply power reliably.

This just isn't true.

With geographical redundancy, pump storage and some batteries (or alternatives) you can get the reliability of the current grid. In 2015 (before the introduction of large scale battery storage) they studied this in Texas and showed how little was required for grid stability. In this case they used natural gas (which remain an option), but nowadays there are completely renewable solutions. Note that this covers more than 10% of the entire electricity generation capacity of Texas.

> In a study commissioned by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, General Electric calculated how much new reserve capacity will be required as Texas increases the amount of wind energy installed. The report found that an additional 15,000 megawatts of installed wind energy only requires an additional 18 megawatts of new flexible reserve capacity to maintain the stability of the grid. In other words, the spare capacity of one fast-ramping natural gas power plant can compensate for the variability introduced by 5,000 new average-sized wind turbines.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/renewable-en...

>But you cannot use 100% renewable energy without some storage technology not currently known.

Tell me what storage are we currently missing?

We have capacitors, flywheels, an uncountable number of battery chemistries, pumped hydro, power to gas and curtailment. We even have exotic storage technologies in the TWh range.

I'll tell you what we are currently missing. We are missing electric grids that have a high enough renewable share to even think about storage. As long as you have a flexible grid you can always make up the lack of electricity on a given day with fossil fuels but if you don't produce excess energy in the first place, storing it is pointless.

Nuclear has a similar problem once you get near 100%, the demand isn't actually flat (spikes during daylight and winter) andthe seasonal variation differs around the globe.

Tge solutions are similar too, build nore so you can cover the peak, or build storage to buffer in the short and long term.

Once you start buffering, you would choose to overbuild renewables because its cheaper.

Nuclear has a very niche future around 5% of global energy, Solar and wind will be doing the heavy lifting.

Nuclear also got much, much more expensive than it was in the previous century, making it economically completely unreasonable in the west.

Nuclear is also the only energy source where people get displaced from their homes in thousands of square kilometers in catastrophic events.

> Nuclear is also the only energy source where people get displaced from their homes in thousands of square kilometers in catastrophic events.

Luckily displacing thousands of people for hydroelectric energy is fully planned [1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-threegorges/thousan...

The thing is, displacement is often not necessary as explained by the WHO for the case of the Fukushima accident:

> https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/health-consequences...

interesting. so the average lifetime dosage was on the low end of a CT scan. ~10mSv where a CT scan will be 10-30mSv. and three mile island let off even less to the people in a 10mile radius... ~80µSv.

> Nuclear also got much, much more expensive than it was in the previous century, making it economically completely unreasonable in the west.

Because we stopped building them. Of course costs are going to explode when every time you do it the people on the project are doing it for the first time.

To be fair, increased reliability and safety also comes at a cost. But I agree - loss of expertise and lack of economy of scale are a major factor.

No, the reason is construction costs are rising faster than inflation because construction hard to automate.

Dam failures would like a word.

You can live on that land unlike on radioactive wasteland.

> completely unreasonable in the west

So... why did France continue to build fission reactors rather than something else?

In the Fukushima case, completely unnecessarily.

Now we just need to make it affordable.

Cost overruns seem to be a big problem in the industry. The US recently canceled 2 plants, and we’re struggling to finish the other 2.

Building it makes it affordable. Giant one-off projects have endemic problems with perverse bidding incentives, cost overruns, and engineering problems. Economy of scale production absolutely dominates most industrial supply chains and engineering.

The US and other modern economies got the political will together to subsidize solar when it rarely made sense on a MW/$ basis and now it's dropped to by far the cheapest source (if you can live with intermittent power).

What drives nuclear costs is generally rising construction costs. You can’t bring that down with building more nuclear power plants.

PV got so much cheaper because it’s a mass producible product.

Nuclear is much cheaper when built at scale. Often 3-5x cheaper. Most of the plants built during the nuclear boom in the 1960s and 1970s were built at a cost of ~$2.5 billion per gigawatt of capacity. Note that this capacity is put out 24/7, so it's equivalent to about 4 times as much solar capacity (which typically has a capacity factor of ~25%).

Solar and wind are cheap in terms of watts per day, but become drastically more expensive one you need to start adding storage. Storage costs are typically in the $200-400 per KWh range for battery storage, and $100 - $200 per KWh range for hydroelectric storage, but the latter is geographically limited.

I also haven't really seen anyone discuss the cost of nuclear in human labor costs. No matter what method or design you use you still need educated workers to babysit both the reactor and the standard turbine infrastructure, whose salary dwarfs whatever costs come from fuel or safety countermeasures.

In contrast, solar and wind tend to be very manpower efficient due to the logistical pain of maintaining something spread over 10 sq. miles forcing investments in reliability and autonomy.

Edit: Messed up wording

I'm not quite sure I follow. Doesn't the "logistical pain to maintain something spread over 10 sq. miles" have a human labor cost too?

Labor costs have to be figured into $/KwH by convention right? They’re not zero for solar.

Ian the same argument for renewables? Subsidize solar panels to make them affordable... the only difference is, solar panels are smaller so we can iterate faster. Maybe that’s what we need to improve about nuclear...

Lots of Small Modular Reactors waiting for political will and funding around. Personally I'm really interested in Soviet-originated SVBR series, but politically it's even more problematic than other designs right now :-(

Let's move it out from government oversight. Anything gov touches gets super expensive, especially in the US. Best example is the Obamacare website.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-24/obamacare...

Imagine how much cheaper you could have built that website with the same functionality. Now apply the same mental process to nuclear power plants.

Yes. The government should only set the safety expectations and procedures, and let the market decide how they do it.

Innovation in nuclear power is broken because of the difficulty to access uranium and use it safely, but if we had innovated, it might have been made safe by now. There has been pilot projects such as a sealed 1m3 cuve, which, by sealing it, solved a lot of problems about safety and human operation.

The government could never build an important highly advanced technical project in a hurry; the atomic bomb project should have been put out to the private sector. /S

Anything the private sector touches has safety issues. Best example is the Bhopal Gas Tragedy.

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

Imagine how much safer it would have been under govt regulations. Now apply the same mental process to nuclear power plants exploding.

I agree, but the argument is a non-starter here and equally so with the general public.

Reducing regulation is a lot more palatable to people than eliminating it.

The problem with nuclear isn't whether you can build a safe plant, you can.

The problem with nuclear is all the assumptions under which a perfectly safe plant is actually perfectly safe (proper maintenance, training, etc.).

I don't believe those assumptions always hold in practice. At the end of the day, these plants are operated by people, and private companies, who have many interests beyond keeping the plant "perfectly safe" (like making money) and also operate under constraints that prevent them from actually keeping the plant "perfectly safe" even if they wanted to (like lack of money).

The problem with nuclear isn't technological, but social. It allows a relatively small bunch of shitty people and companies to cause tremendous amounts of devastation.

Remove people from the "nuclear energy safety equation" and I'm all in with nuclear. Telling me that new plants are perfectly safe as long as people and private companies don't do shit, reads like these plants aren't safe at all to me.

---

And this is without taking into account all the unknown unknowns, like all the natural disasters we can't even predict or imagine, which all plant designs just assume cannot happen.

Just claiming that modern nuclear plants are safe, for all potential world states is BS, because nobody can imagine, much less know, what all those potential world states are.

Sure coal kills people, but what makes many think its safer than nuclear is that we understand how that happens, we understand where coal goes.

See this John Oliver episode about nuclear waste. After 70 years, we haven't even been able to agree in a location to dispose nuclear waste, much less build one, and use it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU&list=PLMJ9OaOo9J...

All the assumptions that nuclear was safer than X over the last 70 year assumed that such a location would exist and be used.

> We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future generations without mass adoption of nuclear power.

I hope not. Current nuclear technologies are outrageously expensive. It made sense in the 50's-70's only because it was being effectively subsidized by the defense industry who needed the excess breeder capacity for bombs.

It's safe. It's fine. It's good that the democrats have dropped what was always effectively a luddite plank from their platform. But it's not going to save us absent some really disruptive new technology.

Right now we should be putting our electricity investment into straightforward, cheap and easily scaled renewables. That is what is going to replace coal and gas in the short term.

Long term? Fine. If nuclear can make the balance sheet work then let's do that. If not, meh.

> For the uninitiated, nuclear power is actually much, much

> safer than it was in the previous century, and fossil fuel

> power plants have killed exponentially more people through

> pollution than all nuclear power accidents combined

I think that nuclear waste will be the next big problem with nuclear energy, with storing it safely for the thousands of years required just being a problem we're kicking down the road. It only needs to leak into the water supplies and suddenly you have a disaster on a scale never seen before (human & animal consumption, contaminated crops and land, etc).

To be honest, renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and hydro are really the way forwards. I would favour solar and wind though, as a failure to invest in infrastructure just means they break - whilst a failure to invest in hydro has some very serious consequences (dam collapse, etc).

In the next 10 years or so I want to see solar panels being recycled if they really are to play a large put of our future energy production. Otherwise there is always the method of pointing mirror arrays at a single spot to heat water.

Nuclear power is not safe and never will be. This ship sailed with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

They are repeating that nuclear plants are safe now. "Safe" of course if some conditions meet. If your car is a parking your probability of dying in a car crash is really low, this is obvious. What really counts is their behaviour in hard times. "If all go well, and we have luck, and everybody behaves, nuclear is safe" is not enough.

A natural disaster, a war, terrorism, another lunatic, sadistic, mentally ill or a psycho reaching power (look around)... and your rainbow-safe-dream will explode into a thousand pieces. And then, what?

Talk me about what is your plan B in THAT conditions.

Hide under the rug and deny all as in the last 50 years?

Did you even read my comment or click on the source I cited? Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy we have.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki had nuclear weapons dropped on them. I'm talking about power plants. The same material can be used in two very different ways to achieve two very different results.

You nailed it. Is the same material.

The same that killed hundred thousands of people in a second in our recent past. Is unsafe stuff by nature. The stupidity of people at charge to see the problem or to invest serious money into fixing weak points, makes it even more dangerous, but the main problem remains: They never were able to fix their s*t, and "but, but, more people die by cars" and "we destined one whole page to our emergency plan" are still the wrong answers.

Is your argument that nuclear energy makes nuclear weapons more likely? If so, could you please elaborate? Decline of U.S. nuclear energy did not affect its capacity for building nuclear weapons, has it? Nuclear bomb decline was caused by treaties, with not a thought dedicated to "but how will they be built?", right?

I do not know the current data, but previously the catastrophy rate was by design below 1 in 10000 years. But this is per plant, we have about 400 plants, so 1 catastrophy per 25 years on average; this values agrees with experiment.

About your statistics: that it is safer was pure luck. In the fukushima incident there were depending on the season two prevalent wind direction either towards the ocean or towards Tokyo. So with a high chance in the range around 50% Tokyo would have been to be evacuated. If anybody has better numbers let me know.

To me not counting this in, is like crossing the street with eye closed and arguing it if not hit so far so good with dismissing close encounters.

I would like to see numbers including this.

Another look at Fukushima can be that the incident was pure bad luck.

Can you elaborate? Do you mean having a Tsunami is pure bad luck in Japan? (With Tsunami actually beiing a japanese word...)

I see your point though, one shouldnt go too much into 'what ifs', because all accidents are in a sense accidents/bad luck. But I still feel we can apply the what if on the outcome of the disasters, especially if it is that seasonal clear cut with high propability.

If I look at the graph to the right and do the division, the numbers don't come out the same as what is quoted. This may have to do with the abominable "x times fewer than y" that makes no sense and likely has a different meaning for every reader.

That's because we don't see more than 2 decimals in the graph. The nuclear column is probably closer to 0.074.

32.72 / 0.074 ~= 442

Would it still be considered safe in a world where flooding becomes much more commonplace in the next 50 years?

> and 38 times fewer than gas.

Chernobyl came close to be 10 or 100X worse. In which case, nat gas and fission are even up.

It most definitely is. But the pace of nuclear development in India slowed to a crawl (no new projects) ever since it started an insurance pool with corporate liability.

By far the safest, if you rely on articles written by the nuclear industry; specifically references 31 and 32 which estimate the fatalities from nuclear energy, in the linked articles primary source, https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(07)61253-7/full....

There is a difference between safety history and risk.

From Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990):

"They told us that nuclear plants were safe.

Human accident is the danger,

not the nuclear plant itself.

No accidents, no danger. That's

what they told us. What liars!"

Proliferation is a big issue, perhaps bigger than climate change. Some modern plant designs try and address that though I think.

Look, I'm a stan for LFTR and thorium reactors, but the nuclear energy industry is full of old PWR reactors on life support that are dangerous and meltdown prone.

But Fukushima happened, and unfortunately the management attitudes in TEPCO are not unique to that company.

The fact is that solar/wind is currently running away from everything else. I believe new natural gas plants can't compete with solar/wind, and that means installed gas plants are in their crosshairs just like coal plants.

Notice your article leaves out solar/wind.

"We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future generations without mass adoption of nuclear power."

I disagree.

We have Hyman G. Rickover, Admiral in the US Navy to thank for steering nuclear energy research away from thorium to uranium.

He very much wanted the Navy to be in command of nuclear wessels carrying nuclear missiles.

If I can remember correctly from research in US energy policy history in college, the US had sunk about 10 years into thorium reactor research when Hyman came along.

Seems rather important to not ignore the violence monopoly. Quit paying it too much serious attention for too long and it gets chippy.

Let’s hope this is PTSD from a generation that was forced to go through hell, often for no reason, and it can normalize out. So long as we live long enough to test that hypothesis.

On the upside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We’ve proven it’s doable.

I’m with you, but this:

> On the upside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We’ve proven it’s doable.

can really be put down to sheer, dumb luck when you hear about all the close calls.

Not the US Navy, but there was this incident:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalk_River_Laboratories#1952_...

you may have heard of the US Navy officer in charge of the cleanup. His name was Jimmy Carter.

Also, the US Navy's record at Hunter's Point in San Francisco is abysmal.

That's why risk analysis looks at defense in depth. It's for people who believe there's no such thing as luck and every close call is a near disaster that needs to be accounted for in the plan.

> the Navy has never had a nuclear accident.

The Navy has never admitted to a nuclear accident (other than radioactive coolant spills and the like, which it has admitted and which are nuclear accidents), but the US government has in other contexts kept nuclear accidents secret for decades after they happened, notionally for security reasons, so why wouldn't they do that with one occurring in the fleet?

> the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We've proven it's doable

Ehem... Where the USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion sailing under Mauritanian flag?

Nope. The US navy has never had a nuclear accident, they just lost two whole nuclear submarines that sank near Azores and Massachussets (but only 220 people were killed so it seems that the army forgot all about it yet).

> On the upside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We’ve proven it’s doable.

Well that's not true:

"An American nuclear-powered submarine leaked radiation for more than two years, releasing the bulk of the material in its home port of Guam and at Pearl Harbor, Japanese and U.S. officials said Thursday."[1]

There was also the A4 that fell off an aircraft carrier with 3 nuclear bombs on board, which were never recovered[2].

Both the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion sunk and haven't had their nuclear reactors or weapons recovered. They do appear to remain intact though.

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nuclear-subs-radia...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Philippine_Sea_A-4_incide...

> We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future generations without mass adoption of nuclear power.

I wish we could discuss such topics without the much-abused climate scare argument. Most debatable, technology-related issues have many other implications worth taking into account. Like grid stability, cost of energy etc. in this case.

But if all you've got is a hammer...

With a failure rate of 1% for commercial reactors, calling something 'safe' is - frankly - ridiculous.

You wouldn't fly planes if they had that failure rate.

It's not just the death count for which, btw, we still don't even have reliable numbers!

What we do have is: Uninhabitable regions, radioactive boars decades after Chernobyl roaming Bavaria (google it), countless cases of cancer, highly radioactive waste we don't know what to do with, billions and billions of tax payer dollars spent on clean-ups, not just for accidents, but for decommissioning plants, plants on fault lines that are ticking time bombs. Nuclear power plants rank first in the amount of economic damage done.

And you are seriously calling for mass adoption?

The engineers and scientists who built Fukushima and Chernobyl thought: Yup, perfectly safe and clean. It makes me mad hearing younger people falling for the propaganda of nuclear power lobbyists who didn't have to live through these accidents.

We have plenty of space and money to turn our grid into 100% renewables, that are safe and cheap. All it would take is the political will to do so.

The times to propose an outdated, dangerous and hard-to-control technology for commercial power generation are over.

> It's not just the death count for which, btw, we still don't even have reliable numbers!

We don't have reliable numbers because the effect of leaked radioactive materials on public health is so low that it's hard to distinguish it from background noise.

Source for "1% failure rate"?

Doesn't exist. If we had a 1% failure rate, we'd have a nuclear catastrophe every year since we have over 400 active reactors world-wide.

I don't believe the 1% number is accurate, but it's a lot higher than people might believe. From 2016:

our range of models suggests that there is presently a 50% chance that (i) a Fukushima event (or larger) occurs every 60–150 years, and (ii) that a Three Mile Island event (or larger) occurs every 10–20 years.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/risa.12587

Summary:

https://mtec.ethz.ch/news/d-mtec-news/2016/07/a-rethink-of-n...

The shift from nuclear to coal in Germany and Japan after Fukushima has caused on the order of 10,000 deaths.

The total number of deaths caused directly by the actual accident at Fukushima was what, one? We'll perhaps have a couple of hundred in the years to come, but that's two orders of magnitude fewer anti-Nuclear activists have caused.

It's not only about deaths. The area around the plant is now uninhabitable and they haven't solved the problem of what to do with the melted cores at the plant. You permanently lose a large swath of land. With coal you can just shut it off and the problem goes away.

And why is it always between coal and nuclear? With enough investment and infrastructure, renewables can serve the need as well.

Yea your right then political atmosphere around both of those situations had absolutely nothing to do with the engineering of the plant and therefore had no impact... ️

There are more industrial accidents in every other power generation source that hurt and kill more. 100% renewals is 100 years out.

I assume you're from Germany when I'm reading your arguments.

> Nuclear power plants rank first in the amount of economic damage done.

No, that's not what science says:

> https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-study-presents-tr...

> https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP304.pdf

> And you are seriously calling for mass adoption?

Yes, and that's actually happening:

> https://in.reuters.com/article/china-nuclearpower/china-to-b...

> https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small...

> https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/UnderConstruction...

> It makes me mad hearing younger people falling for the propaganda of nuclear power lobbyists who didn't have to live through these accidents.

Actually, no one in the West ever thought that the RBMK was a reliable design which is why it was never licensed outside the USSR.

> We have plenty of space and money to turn our grid into 100% renewables, that are safe and cheap. All it would take is the political will to do so.

Germany will have spent more than 500 billion Euros by 2025 for their shift to renewables, yet they are still among the dirtiest producers of electricity:

> https://www.electricitymap.org/

Germany emits 400 grams of CO2 per kWh on average, France just 50 grams. At the same time, the kWh in Germany costs 31 cents while it costs only 17 cents in France:

> https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

And if that isn't already enough, Germany is building and planning more gas and coal power plants:

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_und_im_Bau_bef...

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_Kohlekraftwerk...

> The times to propose an outdated, dangerous and hard-to-control technology for commercial power generation are over.

No, they are not. See my links above. Any country which is actually serious about reducing their CO2 emissions in the electricity sector is massively ramping up the construction of nuclear power plants:

Russia, Finland, Egypt, India, Bangladesh, Czech Republic, Poland, France, the UK, Turkey, Japan, China, the US, Belarus, United Arab Emirates etc. They are all building or planning nuclear power plants.

Germany is the big outlier in the list of the biggest industrial countries and it's just a matter of time when they're joining back the countries who are building and operating NPPs again.

There is simply no alternative, the shift to renewables causes new fossil plants to be constructed which is something we need to avoid by all means if we want to save the climate.

I fear Germany will never build another nuclear power plant again. The anti-nuclear propaganda has become a religion now, any argument about safety is ignored mumbling the mantra "but they said Chernobyl/Fukushima was safe", any argument about economy is ignored with "but renewables cost nothing". Since no rational argument can be won, and since no nuclear counter-religion is on the horizon, nuclear will not happen here, at least not in this century.

Ok, tell me. What are we going to with all the methane and hydrogen that we generated with our power to gas plants if we don't build more gas plants? How are we going to shut down coal plants if we don't have a flexible grid? For reference, an operating coal plant displaces renewable energy because its output cannot be regulated fast enough. Gas plants allow greater grid flexibility.

First endorsement in 48 years? I'm pretty sure this qualifies as an endorsement:

> As detailed in the Climate Action Plan, President Obama is committed to using every appropriate tool to combat climate change. Nuclear power, which in 2014 generated about 60 percent of carbon-free electricity in the United States, continues to play a major role in efforts to reduce carbon emissions from the power sector. As America leads the global transition to a low-carbon economy, the continued development of new and advanced nuclear technologies along with support for currently operating nuclear power plants is an important component of our clean energy strategy. Investing in the safe and secure development of nuclear power also helps advance other vital policy objectives in the national interest, such as maintaining economic competitiveness and job creation, as well as enhancing nuclear nonproliferation efforts, nuclear safety and security, and energy security.

> The President’s FY 2016 Budget includes more than $900 million for the Department of Energy (DOE) to support the U.S. civilian nuclear energy sector by leading federal research, development, and demonstration efforts in nuclear energy technologies, ranging from power generation, safety, hybrid energy systems, and security technologies, among other things. DOE also supports the deployment of these technologies with $12.5 billion in remaining loan guarantee authority for advanced nuclear projects through Title 17. DOE’s investments in nuclear energy help secure the three strategic objectives that are foundational to our nation’s energy system: energy security, economic competitiveness, and environmental responsibility.

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/1...

First endorsement in the official party platform, which is a specific document released by the parties every 4 years (except this year for Republicans who re-adopted their 2016 platform with no changes...).

With some qualifiers this is technically correct, but this only makes it feel more disingenuous.

The Democratic Party platform reflects the position of the party for four years and is voted on and influenced by all delegates (including delegates for candidates that do not win, ex. Bernie's delegates the past two elections).

A page on the Obama administration website reflected the personal opinion of the president at the time it was posted, and can be changed at any time.

The presidential nominee is not necessarily going to agree with the party platform (although they are more or less telling voters they will uphold it). The party and all of its delegates certainly need not agree with everything the president says.

I think it’s fair to ask people to read past the headline to get the whole story.

I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Look at Fukushima for example. It seems hard to imagine a nuclear power plant design, even Gen III or IV that would be immune to any possible natural disaster.

Analysis of nuclear power should take into account Black Swan events: no matter how well designed, some fraction of plants will cause INES Level 7 disasters. If the resulting cost (ie $100s of billions for cleanup), environmental damage, and health impacts are still less than wind or solar, I’m all for it, but pro-nuclear arguments continuously give the tired argument that with new designs “this time is different.”

> I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe.

Nuclear power is relatively safe. Nothing is 100% safe. Rooftop solar actually has a surprisingly high fatality rate from installers falling off of roofs! Fossil fuels release horrible byproducts into the atmosphere, hydro sometimes causes floods...everything has drawbacks.

> Analysis of nuclear power should take into account Black Swan events

Quite right. Analysis of all power options should take into account black swan events (eg, a hydro dam failure taking out a city), but they should also do the reverse, and take into account the normal risks of operations. A coal power plant is subject to any particularly terrible catastrophic failure modes, but every day it operates it spews out a lot of carcinogens.

Imagine a system that kills 5k people once every 20 years, versus a system that kills 1 person a day. You end up with scary headlines about the first one, but the second one kills significantly more people over time.

> pro-nuclear arguments continuously give the tired argument that with new designs “this time is different.”

The pro-nuclear arguments I have seen are much more conservative than that. They point out, correctly, that even counting Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, nuclear energy is relatively safe. If the future ends up safer than the past that would be a bonus, but the past has been shockingly safe.

Coal kills around 13k people every single year in the US alone. How many people have died due to nuclear power in the US in the entire history of nuclear energy?

The roof-falling problem is by far the more palatable one for me.

The people directly working in the industry are suffering the casualties.

There are no completely unrelated deaths or injuries.

And it’s fundamentally easier to make solar roofing safer than it is to make nuclear reactions safer.

> And it’s fundamentally easier to make solar roofing safer than it is to make nuclear reactions safer.

I do not agree with this statement. Although I'm still thinking on how to prove this one way or another.

The closest analogy I can think of is between driving vs flying. It's easy to intuit that driving is fundamentally easier to be made safer than making flying safer. This is empirically not true.

You should expect just the opposite. It’s totally plausible could make nuclear reactions fail safe if you do it right, and I think they’ve figured that out (supposedly). But there’s no way you can force thousands of different people to get up on a roof safely.

How can we know that coal kills 13k people a year in the US? Sure, burning coal releases carcinogens but most of the population lives far away from coal plants.

Similar to how we "know" how many people a low-level nuclear release killed: You know how much of a high dose of some carcinogen it takes for a certain cancer or death risk. You scale this down linearly to low doses. Then you estimate population doses from the release and a few multiplications later you arrive at a "death toll".

You will note the amount of estimates necessary, and the pessimistic assumptions like linear-no-threshold for carcinogen exposure. Most probably, death-tolls estimated this way are upper bounds.

Only for smog events, there is a possible calibration of such estimates through excess mortality, and even that is in some doubt, because smog hits the old-infirm-dying-anyways harder.

This study says 13k: https://www.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/CATF_Pub_TheT...

Estimates vary; some reckon it's more like 50k: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...

> Imagine a system that kills 5k people once every 20 years, versus a system that kills 1 person a day. You end up with scary headlines about the first one, but the second one kills significantly more people over time.

"Imagine a virus that kills 300,000 people once every 100 years, versus a virus that kills 20,000 people per year. You end up with scary headlines about the first one (and shut down economies, and political turmoil, and...), but the second one kills significantly more people over time."

Look at Fukushima for example.

Yes, do that. And you'll find that the meltdown and evacuations killed fewer people than did shutting down all of Japan's nuclear plants afterward (PDF: http://ftp.iza.org/dp12687.pdf). In other words, nuclear power comes out ahead even if you assume there will be a Fukushima-class disaster every 10 years, which is absurdly pessimistic.

Any time I hear that “Fukushima wasn’t that bad!” it just makes nuclear that much further out of reach.

I think a lot of people have yet to internalize this fact: Humans aren't Vulcans, and pure rationality does not now, and never will in the future, drive public policy. Humans are emotional beings, and failing to account for and appeal to that will always result in failure.

Yes, and even when you consider those costs, it pales in comparison to the lives lost and negative externalities of coal, oil, and gas usage. These include climate change, particulate pollution, environmental release of mercury, devastation of vast swaths of the environment worldwide, and other factors that may be hard to quantify but negatively impactful.

There was a post on HN the other day that talked about how hard it is for humans to see beyond direct first order effects. Once you get to indirect or N order effects, it's nearly impossible for humans to fully appreciate.

People see nuclear and it's easy to draw a straight line accident -> damage. People know about mercury is seafood, but they can't seem to attach fossil fuel burning to that problem even when told. It's a disconnect that I hope as a species we will one day figure out. Global warming and weather changes? Good luck.

It helped that there was a whole campaign propped up by the fossil fuel companies to demonize nuclear.

Don't get me wrong - I think there are issues with nuclear - primarily the waste heat - generally ruins the rivers or other local bodies of water even assuming radioactive waste is contained.

There’s already a disinvestment in fossil fuel going on. You have to compare nuclear with renewables.

Why then did we shut down nuclear plants and build coal plants?

Your assuming we can run on renewable, which we can't, and won't be able to in our life time. Germany is a good example.

Agreed. The question I meant to raise was nuclear power versus other alternative energy sources, eg wind/solar/hydropower/geothermal. Comparisons of nuclear power to these other sources are typically dishonest in that they do not account for nuclear disasters. This may be an acceptable risk but it needs to at least be included in analysis, say one disaster per 100 operating years (my estimate of this value: 1 in 50-500 years). Globally, there’s only 440 operating nuclear power plants and there’s been ~100 nuclear disasters. In the last 20 years, there have been at least 6 nuclear plant disasters that cause more than $100 million in property damage.

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

> The question I meant to raise was nuclear power versus other [renewable sources]

(I'll assume this is still about safety, as the comment you're referring to with "meant to raise" started with "I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe".)

As far as I have read, nuclear is the safest option barring none. There are so few nuclear accidents that the casualties are a rounding error and the confidence is low.

But that is not the only thing we're optimizing for. What we need is to have a lower environmental impact so that later generations shall live long and prosper. Wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear all fit that bill right now. Eventually we'll get rid of fission, perhaps in favor of fusion or perhaps of 100% renewables.

Given that we didn't do a large effort in the past few decades on shutting down carbon-based power generation and building 100% renewable green energy without nuclear, and we aren't managing to do it fast enough today, either, we need to make big steps to get there without fighting a billion small battles: one person doesn't like the sight of solar panels on the neighbours' roof (e.g. my dad), another doesn't like a wind turbine in their back yard, hydro power has environmental concerns and doesn't work everywhere... etc. We don't have time for this. Heck, we also don't have the time necessary to build nuclear power plants, but I just don't see any other option than to start now and finally cut down on carbon emissions.

If you're not convinced by nuclear, fine: by all means let us build renewable energy sources at the rate warranted to limit the impact of this climate disaster. I'm just not sure we'll be fast enough.

No one likes to talk about it however the Fukushima disaster could have been prevented with current technology but it was cheaper in the short term not to. Even IF you could have a super safe design a huge part of the problem was the lack of maintenance and actually implementing the safety designs they had. [1]

Why would anyone trust these companies to actually do what is right at the cost of the bottom line?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

No-one talks about it because it isn't relevant. The fact that a 1970s plant didn't get every safety upgrade over the course of 40 years is possible.

But if you do a cost-benifit analysis of nuclear power and just add Fukushima to the cost column it is still an absurdly good idea to go nuclear. The status quo we currently enjoy is comparable to the worst-case in nuclear. If we applied nuclear safety standards I suspect coal fired power plants would have an exclusion zone too; they cause a lot of pollution and the health impacts around them are detectable.

>No-one talks about it because it isn't relevant. The fact that a 1970s plant didn't get every safety upgrade over the course of 40 years is possible.

You dont think plans on how to prevent a disaster caused by a Tsunami 3 years prior to a disaster caused by Tsunami is relevant? Interesting world view.

It was an ancient reactor by today's standards, but you will never convince luddites of that.

Oh jeezs, let's bury our heads in sand and never get out of our houses. How safe is air travel? Taking a car? Fact is, we take calculated risks every day - some smaller, some larger.

Unless you build the plant next to an ocean with on-going seismic activity, you should be pretty safe unless an asteroid hits straight to the vicinity of the plant. Counting out the crazy scientists who decide to do experiments in the middle of the night of course. I think we are past that stage.

And I'm tired of anti-nuclear arguments pretending that wind, solar and hydro energy will miraculously satisfy all our energy needs in the near future. If we phase out fossil fuels and switch to using electric cars and such, we need a lot more energy. Using uranium, otherwise quite useless mineral, we can produce some portion of that energy (as proven). Especially because it doesn't depend on natural conditions so it produces stable output all year around.

I would too prefer having all-green energy sources, but I'm pragmatist and in general not afraid of taking calculated risks in life. Maybe I'm too trusting of my nuclear engineers but then again, I still take planes and ride cars.

Well look at the Boeing Max desaster

> Look at Fukushima for example. It seems hard to imagine a nuclear power plant design, even Gen III or IV that would be immune to any possible natural disaster.

For Fukushima, it seems that the panicked response of the local authorities (evacuating the whole area ...) was what caused the most problems.

The magnitude and extent of the radioactive release was largely unknowable in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. The local authorities were put in an impossible position, either gamble with everyone's health or evacuate at great cost.

The root cause of the dilemma is that the worst case scenario for traditional nuclear is so severe and nobody can tell decision-makers with high confidence whether or not you've just hit it.

The fundamental, unsolvable difficulty of making decisions with imperfect information seems to be often under analyzed. Are there any related fields that study this decision making difficulty?

The automatic shutdown contributed.

Fukushima needed cooling pumps to operate. There were 3 ways to power the pumps:

1. the reactor itself, automatically shut down when the earthquake was detected

2. diesel generators, shut down by flooding

3. power lines from elsewhere, shut down by the tsunami knocking them down

Clearly, shutting down the reactor is a self-inflicted problem. Had they left it running, the pumps would have had power, and the whole disaster wouldn't have happened.

It's a stupid panic-driven regulation that a nuclear power plant must shut down for an earthquake. Once the earthquake hits, it is too late to reach a cool shut-down state. That would take weeks. There is no justification for doing the shutdown. It just caused problems, leading to disaster.

> It's a stupid panic-driven regulation that a nuclear power plant must shut down for an earthquake. Once the earthquake hits, it is too late to reach a cool shut-down state.

It might be too late to reach a cold shut-down state, but it should be enough to reduce a lot of the pressure within the pressure vessel and the piping. If the earthquake causes a crack in the pressure vessel or the piping, this could be the difference between it bursting open and a small leak (or even nothing, if the crack is small enough to not penetrate all the way).

IIRC the reactor itself produces very high voltage power so it can't be used without a transformer that's not on power plant.

Diesel generators should be proper solution but it's sunk on tsunami due to its location.

Exactly zero people died because of radiation at Fukushima. And keep in mind that if the entire exclusion zone was covered with solar panels, it wouldn't produce nearly as much power annually as the nuclear plant did.

>Look at Fukushima for example.

As others have pointed out, this is a 53 year old design. Not exactly the best example for modern nuclear power.

New reactor designs implement passive cooling that allows for 0 interaction for 72 hours. 72 hours is more than enough time for manual intervention to be possible.

>The design is intended to passively remove heat for 72 hours, after which its gravity drain water tank must be topped up for as long as cooling is required [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000

> I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Look at Fukushima for example.

A 49 year old plant with a 53 years old design. Are you serious, did you follow the SOTA?

> Look at Fukushima for example.

Look at Three Mile Island. That is the kind of accident profile with less shitty reactor designs than Chernobyl and Fukushima you should be looking at. Modern PWRs built today are even safer than TMI in accidents.

It is the 50 year old or soviet shitty designs that unfortunately caused the bad reputation of nuclear power. Plants which should have never started operating or should have been shut down a few decades ago, when the next generation (like TMI) came into being.

These "soviet shitty designs" are also 50-60 years old. So they are as shitty as American PWR/BWR designs used in TMI and Fukushima. Positive void coefficient is certainly a design oversight (same as design errors in the early PWR/BWR reactors), but without intentionally fucking with reactor and with a good control system, it can properly work without issues and 10 operational RBMK reactors demonstrate it in practice.

Fukushima were BWRs, and older and far shittier than the PWR in TMI.

TMI is how such an accident "should" look like. And of course there are improvements on that in newer generations.

Guess how many people realistically died from Fukushima radiations? Likely zero [1]. People died from the tsunami, and from the irrationnal panic of the evacuation of people from hospital. Read the Wikipedia article and check the sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

[1] https://www.unscear.org/docs/publications/2013/UNSCEAR_2013_...

One is the issues in Fukushima is that it did not have a working core catcher which is a feature in new (as in, last few decades) designs. You don't need to be immune - only handle failures which have been predicted for the region and warned about.

Core catchers do need emergency cooling working. Also, Fukushima had far more basic failures in far simpler safety features being lacking or absent.

No pressure-resistant containment to speak of.

No hydrogen recombinators.

No passive emergency cooling capacity or properly redundant active emergency cooling because of braindead placement of generators. A fish pond on a nearby hill would have helped, together with gravity...

Any later western reactor design has those. Look at TMI. Thats what it should have looked like, even without a core catcher. (granted, scenarios are not the same)

You’re right. We should continue warming the planet while waiting for the pipe dream that is full renewables.

After all, perfect is the worst enemy of good.

Everyone knows about chernobyl. No one knows about pike river. Yet they killed the same amount of people. Every single nuclear incident is propagandized, yet dirty energy gets a free rap. It's a shame as global warming will cause much more damage than the chernobyl exclusion zone which is essentially a nature reserve now.

Maybe it has something to do with fact that Fukushima as of now caused 0 radiation deaths?

When you dig down to it, they're claimed to be safe because of the difficulty of uniquely nailing down the cause of cancers - so any that are potentially caused are systematically discounted.

> Look at Fukushima for example

Yes, and what about it?

>I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Look at Fukushima for example.

How many people died as a result of the accident?

Wikipedia lists only one. There'll probably be a few hundred in the coming decades as a result of cancers caused by radiation.

Now compare that to the number of people that have died since then, as a result of burning coal. Two, maybe three orders of magnitude more people.

Nuclear power isn't flawless, but the fossil alternatives can kill people every single day.

Fukushima killed somewhere on the order of 10 people? That's a level 7 event on an ancient plant, a wind turbine falling over could easily kill that many people if it landed on a bus. This time it can be different, but your black swan argument isn't much different from our fear of flying.

To be fair, several hundred people died due to the Fukushima evacuations. Which doesn't change the result that nuclear power is extremely safe, even coming in under renewables in deaths per terawatt-hour: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

That’s great, anti-nuclear energy was definitely one of the anti-science stances standing in the way of progress.

I think many oppose nuclear power because for the same cost, you can build a lot of wind, solar, and hydro instead. I don't know if efficiencies have caught up and all. There's less of a catastrophic risk with these compared to nuclear, at least in people's imaginations. (Hydro dams have been broken in the past though and lead to many deaths.)

Except that solar or wind power plant will require significant backing from other power sources (hydroelectric outside of microscale is dead due to environmental concerns and costs), usually gas and coal.

Energy storage is still very expensive in large scale except for pumped hydro storage, which again, is very problematic to arrange.

Wind blows around the clock and solar runs most of the time we are awake. If renewables are super cheap but storage is not viable, can't we simply overbuild?

Yep, if you want California-style rolling blackouts.

Except those have been happening longer than renewables have been a meaningful provider of energy.

Just because you need a bit of science to understand nuclear power plants doesn’t mean that it makes sense to build new nuclear plants.

New nuclear is simply too expensive, with high construction costs in the west.

It's odd to me that anti-nuclear is being labelled anti-science. It's almost like the pro-nuclear people have blinders on. Nuclear is fantastic, in theory. In practice, in the real world, the consequences of accidents are extraordinarily bad and costly. The odds of a bad accident may be very small, but they are not zero (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...). And dealing with the waste is another highly risky and unsolved problem.

I will be happily become pro-nuclear the moment that all the real-world externalities are actually priced in. How much do you think it cost to have 1,000 square miles in the Ukraine uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years? What if such an accident happens in a densely populated area?

How much do you think it will cost to keep all that nuclear waste safe for the next half a million years or so? Plutonium-239's half-life is 24,000 years, and isotopes are dangerous for 10 to 20 times their half-life (cf https://www.livescience.com/33127-plutonium-more-dangerous-u...).

The same problem of externalities exists for fossil fuels, of course. And even for hydro power in a different way: it has displaced millions of people and flooded many beautiful places.

Plutonium-239 is not waste. It is fuel. Use it.

The longer the half-life, the less we care. Bismuth and tungsten are radioactive, with half-lives longer than the age of the universe, but they aren't going to hurt anybody.

> In practice, in the real world, the consequences of accidents are extraordinarily bad and costly.

...not really. Fossil fuels kill a simply enormous amount of people. Coal is responsible for something like 13k deaths per year in the US alone; air pollution (from burning fossil fuels) kills something like 10k people per day.

> How much do you think it cost to have 1,000 square miles in the Ukraine uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years?

A number so low it rounds to zero in this context?

> The same problem of externalities exists for fossil fuels, of course.

I don't think you can handwave that away as an "of course". The externalities around fossil fuels are simply enormous; the issues and costs and risks of nuclear are multiple orders of magnitude less.

> I don't think you can handwave that away as an "of course". The externalities around fossil fuels are simply enormous; the issues and costs and risks of nuclear are multiple orders of magnitude less.

That wasn't intended as a handwave. Fossil fuel externalities are indeed enormous and well documented.

It's exhausting to talk to pro-nuclear people, because all everyone ever talks about is nuclear vs fossil. That was the 20th century's fight.

Fossil fuel for the generation of electricity is already doomed, because solar and wind are way cheaper now. Capitalism will take care of finishing off coal, the sooner the better, if we want to keep the planet livable.

In combination with rapid technological innovation in grid-scale storage, we will hopefully end up with a low-carbon power generation solution, one that does not involve risks of a nuclear accident, nor nuclear waste.

The negative real-world externalities of oil production aren't priced in, from explicit subsidies to global warming. Why does nuclear have to ascribe to such an unrealistic goal? That cripples the industry unfairly.

We already know and have well-studied the negative externalities of nuclear. They are significantly lower than fossil fuels where, for example, coal kills far more people with radiation than nuclear power plants do (even including Fukushima & Chernobyl). Yes, nuclear is dangerous and should be handled with caution. The only standard should be if it's better or worse than existing technologies where it's a resounding yes.

> I will be happily become pro-nuclear the moment that all the real-world externalities are actually priced in. How much do you think it cost to have 1,000 square miles in the Ukraine uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years? What if such an accident happens in a densely populated area?

We don't need to speculate here. That's precisely what happened in Fukushima. Evacuation orders were lifted in 2017. Radiation release in populated areas makes cleanup worthwhile. By comparison, the exclusion zone around Chernobyl still exists because the entire town existed to support the power plants. Once the power plants were no longer operational there was no real reason for the town to exist, and thus no incentive for cleanup.

And you're applying a double standard here. Do fossil fuel plants have to price in the estimated damage done due to climate change? That's estimated to

> How much do you think it will cost to keep all that nuclear waste safe for the next half a million years or so?

Million years or so? You realize uranium is a toxic heavy metal? Naturally occurring uranium is toxic. Spent nuclear waste is toxic forever. And it would have been toxic forever even if it was never used as nuclear fuel. In fact, uranium contamination of water is already a concern due to naturally occurring uranium [1]. The risk of uranium water contamination exists regardless of spent nuclear fuel.

Storing it isn't actually all that hard. You bury it in bedrock in an area with no aquifer. The main concern for uranium is water contamination. Putting it in a place with no aquifer eliminates the possibility of contamination even if the containment vessels deteriorate. The scenarios in which waste fuel results in contamination are borderline absurd, typically involving some sort of societal collapse destroying all knowledge of the disposal sites coupled with some future civilization digging up the waste for no discernible reason.

The cost of such a disposal facility is minimal: around $200 million for the Yucca Mountain facility [2]. Disposal isn't very expensive because the amount of waste generated is so small. The entirety of the US's nuclear waste from power generation occupies a volume the footprint of a football field and less than 10 yards high [3].

1. https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/120396/uranium-contaminat...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

3. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

> The odds of a bad accident may be very small but they are not zero

re: Very small

We've had nuclear power less than a century and we've had more than one significant event, and even more near events.

But its not simply the odds, but the impact. We have yet to see a worst case scenario. How much longer can that last?

I've been reading "Normal Accidents" by Perrow. I started reading the book expecting an even-keeled explanation of risk, but I was pretty shocked by how prejudiced against Nuclear the tone was.

It was also a reminder of how TERRIBLE the industrial design (aka UX) of reactor monitoring and controls were at the time the book was written (1984).

So many of the things he seems to have felt were insurmountable could be solved by better design, something the book goes a long way toward dismissing.

Anti-nuclear sentiment seems to be one of those things that became widely fashionable, and Pro-nuclear became demonized.

>Anti-nuclear sentiment seems to be one of those things that became widely fashionable, and Pro-nuclear became demonized.

There was a concerted effort to connect all nuclear power with nuclear weapons in the 80's and 90's. The effects of that are still with us.

It's still a thing today. Look at the Iran deal. I don't know enough to comment on whether its a good or bad thing but a lot of people think that Iran purifying Uranium == Iran developing nukes.

I have preached until I was red in the face that nuclear is the only solution we have currently that will get us to zero emissions on a proper time scale when it comes to global warming. I am all for wind and solar, but you have to be practical as well. We don't have anything that is even close to being able to provide stable 24 hour power like nuclear. Obviously we want a mix, but there are safe nuclear designs out there. And the feds will just have to overrule the NIMBYs on an official site or three for properly controlling the waste.

Neither the US not UK has built and finished a new nuclear plant in 40 years, and the single one (1) in progress in the UK is a 15-20 year project with a construction cost of £23Bn and a subsidy of £50Bn.

Trying to turn the small UK nuclear like this would cost £1Tn private construction, £2Tn government subsidies, and take 700 years.

Assuming it actually gets finished and not shelved by economic collapse/Brexit as its being built by a French company.

It goes with Patrick Collision’s question about why the West can’t build big projects quickly and affordably anymore.

Rolls-Royce were in the news recently with a mass-manufacturing small nuclear reactor design, but at this rate the political arguing will see us with Lithium battery storage for intermittent renewable years before 50 new nuclear plants for baseline/backup capacity. Or buying Russian nuclear power surplus in 2050.

> Neither the US not UK has built and finished a new nuclear plant in 40 years, and the single one (1) in progress in the UK is a 15-20 year project with a construction cost of £23Bn and a subsidy of £50Bn.

This is a great point and its why we should urgently be analyzing the failures of new nuclear projects to understand what’s going wrong and why we can’t do something that we could do in the 1960s and 1970s without issue (France nuclearized its power sector in less than 2 decades!)

Renewable energy sources have zero fuel costs. Their potential for life-threatening disasters - on the scale of Fukushima, Chernobyl, coal ash floods, etc. - is zero.

Just as with coal mines, uranium mines and oilfields, there's a large upfront cost ... but a much lower cost to the environment.

Furthermore, anyone can create solar-powered electricity, anywhere. There will be no wars over access to sunlight. Sunlight is a democratic power source, which cannot be monopolized by special interests. Nomads in Mongolia make their own electricity. Anyone living near a creek can make their own hydro ... thousands do.

Once renewables are built, apart from maintenance, the cost of the energy and its transport is free, and (apart from recycling costs) pollution-free. It will continue to be free until the generator has to be replaced, some stupid war destroys it, and/or the Sun burns out. Too obvious for some interests.

Attempts to distort these facts, to maintain monopolies and continue to enrich a very few, will persist. It's easy to invent lies and distortions and to spread FUD about renewables. Yep, there's a lot at stake. For a few.

But what's best for the biosphere and its people? For the people of the future, including our kids and grandkids? For all the lifeforms, the water sources, and the atmosphere of the planet? The answer is renewable -- and the technology to support its generation and storage is a superior and long-lasting investment.

> Renewable energy sources have zero fuel costs.

That's not true. It costs fuel to mine the resourses needed, to build the equipments, to install them, to maintain them. The IPCC states that globally, nuclear power emits _less_ greenhouse gases than hydro and solar, and emits about the same as wind. [1]

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... Table A.III.2, page 1335

For more info, please see this eye opening TedX talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak

The table linked lists the following lifecycle emissions (min/median/max)

* Hydropower: 1.0/24/2200

* Concentrated solar: 8.8/27/63

* Rooftop Solar PV: 26/41/60

* Utility Solar PV: 18/48/180

* Wind Onshore: 7.0/11/56

* Wind Offshore: 8.0/12/35

* Nuclear: 3.7/12/110

I've gotta say, Nuclear/Utility Solar/Hydro all have massive ranges in their lifecycle emissions. If you're basing "which tech has the lowest lifecycle emissions" from the median alone, you're not getting the full story. Rooftop solar is a lot more consistent than Nuclear, for example.

What units are we talking here?

Joules? Bananas? Pears? My physics teacher would say...

The crazy part is that all over the world nuclear is being phased out as it's uneconomic compared with renewable energy. I wonder why they chose now as the time to endorse it, just when it's no longer relevant. So strange.

It's not one or the other. Renewables on their own can't work. They need to be paired with another energy source. This is where Nuclear (or coal or else) comes useful.

Coal displaces renewables. Nuclear power displaces renewables. Gas plants don't displace renewables. I seriously wonder why people don't understand something this simple.

In the last 10 years there has been an explosion in new renewable power plants. Consumption of solar energy has increased by 20x. Wind by 5x. Even hydro has gone up almost 30%.

But for every 1 watt hour of extra renewable energy, fossil fueled energy consumption has expanded by 10 watts. Gas and oil usage has only gone up, and the increase from 2010 in just coal consumption is more than the total amount of wind generated in the whole world.

The biosphere and its people, the future, all our kids and grandkids, water sources, atmosphere, it all depend on us stopping fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels when there are better alternatives available is a an on going crime facilitated by almost every government on the planet.

It would be good to say that the answer is renewable, but it the wrong answer to the wrong question. The answer to the short and long term danger to the planet is a immediate stop to the production and expansion of fossil fueled energy. No new fossil fueled power plant should be allowed to be built in 2020 and onward. The answer about what we do next is also related to fossil fuels, ie any alternative energy source which is not fossil fuels. We need to ramp up production of solar, wind, storage and nuclear and we need people to invest into that today. There is only so many trained people in those fields and only if everyone is working on fossil fuels alternative may we get a functional energy grid without fossil fuels fast enough.

Do you take into account storage? Having zero electricity at night or on cloudy days is not an option. So it’s either batteries or nuclear. On the scale of powering a city, what make more sense?

Wind and water are other sources as well, though maybe not quite as efficient.

You can't guarantee there is going to be enough wind at night.

Wind power is surprisingly bad for the environment in the long run.

The blades need to be changed at regular intervals, weigh tens of thousands of kilos and are 100% unrecycleable, basically glass and carbon fibre.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

Why can't we create a nuclear power plant in the middle of the desert like area 51 type of setup so if there is a meltdown it can be contained. Could we safely store the energy somehow and transport it or make some sort of long-distance hookup to our grids?

Also anyone know why the nuclear site in San Onofre by San Diego failed?

> Why can't we create a nuclear power plant in the middle of the desert

In principle we can. Dry cooling is more expensive and less efficient than using water, but technically doable.

But the plant requires personnel. Said personnel has kids, spouses etc. You end up with a small town to run the plant. And that town requires fresh water which might be hard to come by in the middle of the desert.

> Could we safely store the energy somehow and transport it or make some sort of long-distance hookup to our grids?

We could store the energy in nuclear fuel, at the amazing energy density of 80 TJ/kg. Hard to beat that, except with fusion or antimatter. :)

Anyway, long distance electricity transmission is technically doable; HVDC losses are < 3%/1000 km. But again, it costs money.

> Also anyone know why the nuclear site in San Onofre by San Diego failed?

They detected premature wear on new steam generators. In the face of stiff opposition by local state politicians, rather than fixing it they decided to decommission the entire plant.

> But the plant requires personnel.

So all we need is to build the plant and then automate the entire operations.

Because nuclear power is still just thermal power. You need access to coolant. Ever wondered why a tsunami prone island like Japan decided to place a nuclear plant near the ocean? Doesn't that sound like a very stupid decision? Well, the reality is that this a necessary requirement for monolithic nuclear power plants. Rivers vary in their flow rates depending on the season. If the flow rate is too low there is less cooling capacity and subsequently you will have to turn the nuclear plant off, which will seriously hurt the economics of the plant. The only reliable cooling source is the ocean. Of course, if you have smaller plants you can live with less cooling.

So what if we build it in the middle of the ocean?

Also anyone know why the nuclear site in San Onfre by San Diego failed?

Excuse my pedantry, but hydro is renewable, you have replies counting it as renewable, and a hydro dam failure long ago in china is the record holder of energy disaster casualties.

292 comments and no one talks about the Democratic candidate that was most vocal about nuclear, specifically thorium?

"Yang is absolutely right to make these points, and he has gotten some well-deserved attention. But it’s surprising that he hasn’t gotten more, given how much we’re hearing about the crisis nature of climate change. Because if you take climate change seriously, you have to take nuclear power seriously"

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/09/17/2020-democ...

It’s not about climate change, it’s about controlling behavior via energy prices. The non-nuclear climate change advocates don’t care about “carbon,” they care about wealth redistribution. That’s why I oppose most “climate” policy. Because it isn’t about climate.

Carbon and wealth redistribution should be separate issues, but activists have made them the same and since I oppose wealth redistribution via government economic control, I can’t get on board with “climate.”

https://ips-dc.org/stop-climate-change-dont-just-cut-carbon-...

So I thought the consensus among economists, hn, etc was that the best most painless way to solve climate crisis is a carbon tax, that doesn't drastically alter the economy all at once. So what to do with the tax money? Presumably invest in green energy. A lot of that can help people directly, like solar and nuclear jobs, and indirectly, like better trains, or subsidies for the poor on any essential goods that price was raised by the carbon tax a lot. We can probably find a use for all the money raised by placing a carbon tax at the rate needed to prevent catastrophic climate change. But if we put the tax at the right rate and have some money afterwards, what's wrong with free college?

That’s the next next next level of climate change denial. After denying it’s happening, after denying it’s human-made, after denying it’s solvable, we deny it’s solvable without ideological tarnishments.

The linked document has nothing to do with climate change denial, but with climate justice, which was one of the main talking points of the school strikes last year, and also concerns the UN: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/clima.... See also https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-climate/

> We deny it’s solvable without ideological tarnishments.

No matter how you put it, climate change is completely unsolvable without politcs, because solving climate change requires, most of all, cooperation between countries.

"The world is dying but I think saving it would be tantamount to communism, which is evil because it's killed millions." Excellent logicking.

You'll take basically any excuse to not do anything about climate, right?

Folks should parse the article and the platform carefully, it actually reads "existing and advanced nuclear". This could be interpreted as maintaining existing reactors and building advanced (fusion?) reactors and NOT building new fission reactors.

From my perspective this interpretation would be desirable (although probably wishful thinking) given that nuclear energy is too expensive in practise (really only existing plants are competitive with solar), too slow to construct (10 year average construction time in the US?!), centralized and generally poorly managed. The construction of new nuclear fission plants for grid power in the United States isn't going anywhere, since it makes absolutely no economic, environmental or political sense. Yes, most of us on Hacker News know it is better than fossil fuels - but renewable energy is the new competition. Nuclear is going directly against solar with (or without) battery backup and it's been losing for years now - even China has slowed down the pace of construction.

Nuclear grid power advocates should take their arguments to Mars where they will actually have a case. Not much of an atmosphere to spin a turbine, far away from the sun and an environment that makes the Antarctic look like a Garden of Eden should anything go wrong.

> it makes absolutely no economic, environmental or political sense

Environmental? As far as I understand, the much lower emissions (not zero because of construction, people driving to the plant, etc.) compared to our current main power sources is a huge benefit for the environment (and thus for us: even if you are right that it's more costly per kWh today, it might save the next generation many trillions). Given the phrasing "absolutely no [environmental] sense", it sounds like you're very sure it must be negative for the environment but I don't understand why.

I am generally supportive of nuclear but only because from what I read, it seems to be a big help in reaching environmental needs. I get the economics part: nuclear isn't super cheap and gets easily outcompeted by renewables on sunny or windy days. I also expect we'll start abolishing nuclear fission in favor of fully renewable sources as soon as we finished turning off carbon-based power plants (and, in a perfectly rational world, no sooner). If there is more to the story like some environmental effect that I'm not aware of then I'd like to hear it (note that I did read up on nuclear energy so you can assume I know the basics; I pose the comment somewhat questioningly not because I haven't done any research but because I think this is a constructive way to learn).

Indeed.

In TFA 'fission' is only used once, and that's as the author quotes from a statement made in 1972:

" ... the party said it supported “greater research and development” into “unconventional energy sources” including solar, geothermal, and “a variety of nuclear power possibilities to design clean breeder fission and fusion techniques.” "

The continued muddling of fission and fusion is regrettable, as the former's increasingly looking unpalatable, and the latter's gaining more credibility & interest. Plenty of people would be for one but not the other.

Solar and wind are only viable with storage. Storage at immense scales that are not remotely possible with our current technology. What are we going to do to fulfill electricity demand at night, which is actually when peak consumption occurs?

With solar and wind, the answer is that we keep burning fossil fuels. California and Germany still get 50-60% of their electricity from fossil fuels despite large investments in solar and wind power. Hypothetically it's possible to get below that with energy storage. But the amount of capacity it would require to make that possible is immense. We'd need 12 hours of storage to get to 80% renewables and 3 weeks of storage to get to 100% renewables [1]. By comparison the US has ~5 minutes of storage currently, most of it in the form of hydroelectric storage which is geographically limited.

By comparison, France has been using nuclear power as its primary energy source for close to half a century at this point. Its carbon intensity is far lower than Germany's despite lower energy costs.

The cynical reality is that you're right: solar and wind make sense from a political perspective. Low cost, rapid installation time. The fact that it's a dead end won't surface until well after the current generation of politicians' terms are up.

1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...

I used to be an advocate for nuclear energy but over time I've become it has no future because:

1. Even if it's safer by any objective measure (deaths/kWh for example) the failure modes are much, much worse. A fossil fuel plant just can't make thousands of square miles uninhabitable for decades. This isn't an exaggeration. The Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone is currently 1000mi^2 [1]. This is like how people are afraid to fly but not drive when flying (on.commercial jets at least) is undeniably safer;

2. Processing of fuel creates waste we just don't have a good way of dealing with (eg UF6);

3. Spent fuel creates waste we just don't have a good way of dealing with;

4. Decommissioning nuclear power plants creates waste we just don't have a good way of dealing with;

5. The above three costs seem to be borne by governments. It's still unclear to me if companies who run nuclear power plants are paying the true costs;

5. I just don't trust companies to manage nuclear plants safely long term;

7. I don't trust most governments to manage nuclear plants long term; and

8. Many nuclear power advocates will bring up coal as the counterexample. That's a false dichotomy. Wind and solar costs continue to plummet. Natural gas, while still a fossil fuel, has way less negative externalities than coal.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone

The most interesting part of this article is that for just 4T, we could be off carbon energy: https://www.woodmac.com/news/feature/deep-decarbonisation-th...

That’s not much more than the government spent to counteract the economic effects of cornovirus.

I have seen 0 proof that mankind can handle the resposability that comes with this type of extreme risk but at low probability technologies. If anything. It is getting worse in that regard.

Not an american here, so it's more of a general comment.

I'm all for investing in and investigating nuclear power -- after all, the humanity needed several decades to make electricity itself safe at all; if we manage to make nuclear safer and indeed manageable, that's a fine thing, scientifically speaking. It's good to have options.

However, we should be keeping an eye on the costs. Nuclear energy is cheap, but disposing of its waste is anything but. In Europe, energy companies have essentially socialised waste disposal so that they can advertise for "cheap" nuclear energy. If the disposal costs had been placed on them, nuclear would be the most expensive energy source by far.

We are probably better off future-wise looking elsewhere for a clean and cheap energy source. Fossil and nuclear are neither.

I'm not in the energy field, but I do have hopes that we can find a way to make nuclear fuel use more efficient, thereby reducing the amount of waste: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-let...

But as long as we have this kind of rhetoric there will be no incentive to solve the current problems with nuclear power.

The lack of transparency and the concentration of power is one of the biggest points against the nuclear energy sector. It affects their safety investments, oversight, subsidies, insurance contracts, responsibilities, and so on.

What if we shot it in to space? Doesn't Space X think they can get cargo down to $100/kg? That would be a few hundred million in costs for all of the worlds nuclear waste annually.

The problem is failed shot causes catastrophic result.

Funny how everyone is able to talk so much shit about nuclear being amazing and safe and all that, yet we've STILL not cleaned up the monstrous amount of TOXIC trash that has been produced by these plants. We have done nothing to stop creating more waste, and we have done nothing to deal with the toxic waste we have right now. To be honest I don't CARE if you want to call it safer when there is no direct proof of that, only proof of the contrary. There are hundreds of thousands of people still affected by major accidents, and the waste leftover from them worldwide. Trying to keep pushing nuclear for anything is an ignorant shortsighted choice.

[1] https://www.greenamerica.org/fight-dirty-energy/amazon-build... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and... [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/05/31/new-map-...

And what about deaths and respiratory problems caused by burning fossil fuels? What about CO2 used to produce solar/wind powerplants? How to recycle retired or failed wind/solar powerplants? It is pretty ignorant to just look at couple of nuclear incidents and ignore the amount of energy those plants can produce. Can you imagine the amount of power the current humanity needs? If you want less waste, start reducing population growth in high-growth countries first... Here is a good video comparing various sources of energy and relevant facts https://youtu.be/lL6uB1z95gA

How much of the resistance to nuclear power in the US was due to the very unfortunately combination of the Three Mile Island incident and the release of the movie The China Syndrome both happening within two weeks of each other? Add in the nuclear arms race of the time and the emotional aspect for anything nuclear becomes even greater.

My uneducated gut feeling is that the only way nuclear is going to be relevant is if they perfect micro-nuclear reactors.

I remember reading about these 10 years ago [1], and have seen a few more since. Basically they propose small "nuclear batteries" kin of design - this avoids catastrophic scenarios and benefits greatly from economies of scale.

The only issue I see with this approach is political - you would have a lot more nuclear material spread around, spreading this kind of teach where it's easily accessible and hard to protect doesn't sound reasonable with the political situation in the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S

There certainly are mini reactor designs which can be put in a grid like network to create the same effect as our current huge-but-old reactors. Luddites, just won't have it, but maybe if leaders just go ahead and get a backbone we can have such things that might just save us from extinction (or at least the end of civilization, I'm sure at least a small cadre of humans will survive, we're pretty adaptable as a species). https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small...

The debate around safety in nuclear power is kind tangential to the larger issue: what do you do with all this radioactive material when you’re done with it?

This is a much trickier issue and is largely why countries like Germany have started to phase out nuclear power plants. But the US treats the whole world as their dumping ground and as long as they are the global imperial power, they can probably just dump radioactive waste in some poor part of the world.

Nuclear waste is not that much actually and you simply store it in sealed containers. The waste storage is a political issue rather than a technical issue. How many accidents have we had related to nuclear waste storage? Zero, that's how many.

There isn't enough material to run enough nuclear plants to make a difference. This is or should really be common knowledge.

At present consumption rates (10% of global electrical generation), 230 years' supply. That's expected to increase with technological improvements, but would of course be reduced by an increase in either nuclear fraction or total electrical generation, each likely.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...

If we relied on nuclear for all electrical generation, about 20 years or less.

Could you elaborate or link to a source that does?

Edit: Another comment[1] says "there's more than enough for couple centuries (and new reactor designs can make one-two orders of magnitude better use of what's available)". Your statement "not enough to make a difference" seems quite different from "enough for centuries". If you think this is wrong, a bit of elaboration beyond the simple statement couldn't hurt...

They also make the point which I was going to make even if there turned out to be a significant limit to the amount of material available:

> even if we only had 100 years worth of nuclear fuel reserve, that's more than enough to fix the climate problem and fully develop renewables

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24325737

Consider that rising populations and standards of living, as well as shifts from fossil fuels, mean increasing total electrical generation likely by ~500% in the next 50 years or so.

The alternative is a large number of very disappointed people.

True, so we have to divide "centuries" by 5 or more, that's still long enough to help with the transition. Not sure if that's what you meant though? Please correct me if I misunderstood.

It's quite possible that if most people owned a solar roof with batteries and redundancy across a specified and localized grid, there would be less need for large power plant owners and fewer donations to political parties. In short, it is easier for politicians to get donations from a small group of people than from a large group.

Once I saw a TV show about the challenges of constructing a deposit for nuclear waste that is expected to operate for thousands of years.

In this show, they mentioned that they did not want to use skulls to represent danger, because skulls are not seen as dangerous in some cultures (with "Dia de los muertos" as an specific example).

A real problem and challenge. Notions of language and culture are unstable over such periods, let alone organisations, institutions, and governments.

https://wipp.info

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin...

https://www.vox.com/videos/2018/1/29/16932718/biohazard-desi...

This was discussed extensively on a previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11851871

Major takeaway - you also can't say it's a place of death because an unscrupulous/desperate warlord might view symbols of death as ways to achieve power.

What is the RNC's stance on nuclear?

Does nuclear now enjoy bi-partisan support? Or just the Dems?

The RNC doesn't have a platform in 2020 so we can't speak of a defined Republican position on individual issues anymore. In their previous platforms, they supported expanding nuclear: http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2012/09/18/the-party-platforms-on-...

The article states that the Republican Party is pro-nuclear and anti-government, and the Democratic Party was anti-nuclear and pro-government.

While it seems from the headline that both parties are now pro-nuclear, it is unclear how that will play out at a policy level. Based on the quoted stance of being "technologically-neutral", it may well be the case that Democrats still won't support nuclear power, not because they are against it as a rule but because they see solar and wind as being superior alternatives.

A bit meta, but as someone from Europe where the countries aren't usually divided into two opposing camps, this seems oddly phrased to me. Could someone from the USA who considers themselves either neutral or a democrat comment on whether "just the Dems" sounds negative to you?

It doesn't sound negative to me at all; just a factual way of stating that the policy is only supported by one party. Perfectly normal figure of speech here in the states.

If the Democrats are for it, then they are against it.

The Republican Party has been pro nuclear for years...

Yeah, and they were anti-Russia, for small government and personal responsibility. The GOP isn't what it used to be. I have no idea where they stand on anything and even if I did, I wouldn't bet that it's the same tomorrow.

Abundant energy is the way to a post scarcity society.

Better late than never...

But what's going to happen with the nuclear waste? I've heard too many times about water getting into permanent repositories and leaking containers contaminating the biosphere. Seems like a bad idea to me...

Nuclear waste is primarily a political problem (which actually makes it damn near impossible to solve in the near term).

There's no fundamental problem with it, since it's produced naturally as well [1] and sites exist that would allow for very safe long term storage if need be.

It's also possible to get rid of long lived decay products entirely using certain types of reactors that can "burn" nuclear waste.

Again, political will and major investments would be required to make that happen, though some companies are already working on it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo_Mine

You can reprocess it.

France does so, Japan does so, even Poland sold off nuclear waste from research reactors for reprocessing - the parts of it that aren't critical medical radioisotopes, which we sold separately for use in hospitals etc.

All of French fuel waste fits in one hall. That's smaller than space taken by one fly ash repository at a coal plant.

The Democratic party on most issues will eventually do the right thing, against its own will, dragging kicking and screaming the entire way.

In a way, this is the first time the Democrats are truly taking climate change seriously.

It's in a very specific way only. Have you heard about Jay Inslee?

Finally

Within 5 years every machine, building and device may start the transition to self-charging nuclear diamond batteries with graphene super capacitors. [1] [2] [3]

So these huge nuclear power plants may quickly become obsolete along with coal, solar and wind power generation, hydro and fossil fuels.

[1] https://ndb.technology

[2] https://newatlas.com/energy/nano-diamond-self-charging-batte...

[3] https://newatlas.com/energy/nano-diamond-battery-interview-n...

BTW I think HN downvoters should lose karma for downvoting.

>⌇ Possibility of a new generation quantum smartphones.

>⌇ Personal quantum computers

Yeah I can't take this seriously

Yeah not sure why they mentioned quantum computing there without any supporting information.

However given the rate of scientific progress in general I would say it's very likely to be achieved in the not-too-distant future, somewhere.

A general anti-science movement really hurts human progress with these 3 particularly bad: 1) anti vaccines 2) anti GMO 3) anti nuclear

Great to see Dems starting to endorse nuclear after decades of oppositions (see John Kerry’s boneheaded earlier efforts to kill it)

You don’t have to be anti-science to be against building new nuclear power plants. And it’s a bit ridiculous to speak about human progress when talking about GMO in agriculture, when all it’s used for is plants creating their own insecticides and herbicide tolerance for furthering unsustainable monoculture farming.

Then those people should be anti-pesticide / anti-monoculture not anti-GMO.

That's like being anti-steel because weapons are being made out of steel.

> You don’t have to be anti-science to be against building new nuclear power plants

That needs a bit more justification. It certainly hasn't been true for the last 40 odd years and by extension most of the anti-nuclear types probably are also anti-science.

Generally they're the sort of people who'll hold global warming up as a real problem and then argue that Fukushima is an unacceptable risk. It is hard to hold both those positions and be heavy on the science. On the scale that global warming is a risk the risk from a nuclear plant can't even be detected. I've lived next to a coal fired power plant; the science is very, very clear I'd have better life outcomes if I'd lived near a nuclear one.

I thought having enough healthy food with as small of environmental impact as possible is good for human progress /s

Labeling differing opinions antiscience really hurts discussion and quite ironic.

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