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Comment by tbenst | Hacker News Reader

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.”

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> 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.

Every rooftop is somewhat different. You can't just make all roofs safe.

While with nuclear reactors, you can design them to be as safe as needed. (Altough, I do think they are overregulated in certain areas.)

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.

That's a great reason to predict nuclear power will not be built, but a terrible reason to e.g. vote against it.

We could shut down a technology on a single fatality if we focused hard enough on the victim and their family.

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?

Because it feels good is my guess. Over here in europe, Germany basically did the same thing. They now have higher cost AND pollution per kwh than france, who has MUCH more nuclear.

Oh and germany often has to sell the energy for very cheap when the renewables are having a peak, and buy pretty expensively when they are having a drought.

>They now have higher cost

Well, this chart proves the opposite:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

Remember, when you're talking about how nuclear is cheaper you're talking about the cost of generating power, not what the consumer is paying.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/industrial-power-prices-and-...

From the article, it seems to be a graph detailing how much they pay with all exemptions applied. Which, according to the article itself, only about 4% are eligible. The article doesn't seem to state how much the partial exemptions make up of the final price either. Could be 1% of the exemption, could be 99%.

> For example, Europe's Statistical Office Eurostat says the average power price for industrial consumers in Germany was about 14 cents/kWh in 2017 – the highest in Europe. But the following graph also reveals that German companies with maximum exemptions would pay the lowest price in Europe (energy price component):

> Out of 46,400 industrial companies active in Germany, 96 percent paid the full surcharge in 2017, while only four percent benefitted from exemptions, according to the association. At the same time, 41 percent of electricity used by industry is partially exempt from the surcharge, while 43 percent is not exempt at all. The remaining 16 percent of the power originates from own generation facilities, part of which is also exempt. The utilities forecast that German industry will use a total of 246 TWh in 2019.

And I was actually talking what the customer is paying, because that is what is relevant to most people.

Did you account for the footprint of building the plant (all that concrete manufacturing produces lots of CO2)? And the footprint of the waste storage (again concrete, potential for leaks)? Footprint of mining? Lots of Uranium produced in the the developing countries (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine) which have poor safety standards.

The problem with peaks is not a defect of renewables, it is a temporary problem, which will be resolved once we build international power grid.

> Did you account for the footprint of building the plant (all that concrete manufacturing produces lots of CO2)?

Same can be said about renewables and such, which produce MORE pollution per amount of capacity, along with having a even worse footprint.

> And the footprint of the waste storage (again concrete, potential for leaks)?

Are you talking about waste from setting it up or waste from operation?

> Footprint of mining? Lots of Uranium produced in the the developing countries (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine) which have poor safety standards.

The uranium mines definitely can be improved. I agree with that. Same could be said with rare earth mines needed for solar panels, for example.

> The problem with peaks is not a defect of renewables, it is a temporary problem, which will be resolved once we build international power grid.

We DO have a international power grid in europe. Still doesn't solve the problem, or even close to solving it.

In summary, I feel like nuclear is currently still the better option. I am not saying to not use renewables though, but that replacing nuclear with renewables/other fossils is currently a bad idea.

Really? Footprint of manufacturing a renewables based plant worse than building huge concrete buidling? Do you have data to support this?

Of course I am talking about operational waste storage.

Rare earth mining has so much smaller scale than Uranium mining however.

I honestly do not understand why are molten salt power plants not more popular. They have essentially zero pollution, they do not use anything exotic, relatively low tech, can run even during dark hours.

We do not have energy grid which would cover whole or most of the world. Once it covers USA, Russian and China there will be no need to store renevable energy.

> Really? Footprint of manufacturing a renewables based plant worse than building huge concrete buidling? Do you have data to support this?

As I currently do not have access to my list of sources, I'll have to get back to you on that later.

> Of course I am talking about operational waste storage.

Then nuclear wins, due to how compact the spent fuel/irradiated material is. Along with the HLW decaying rather quickly, while MLW and LLW not being hard to contain for a relatively long time (Enough to have it fall close to, or below background radiation levels)

> Rare earth mining has so much smaller scale than Uranium mining however.

I currently lack access to my bookmarks on that either.

> I honestly do not understand why are molten salt power plants not more popular. They have essentially zero pollution, they do not use anything exotic, relatively low tech, can run even during dark hours.

My guess is because you need to have either a lot of sunlight or use up quite a bit of land area to get a decent amount of energy out of it. Also frying birds that fly through it.

> We do not have energy grid which would cover whole or most of the world. Once it covers USA, Russian and China there will be no need to store renwable energy.

I don't think that is feasible in a timespan where we don't get power satellites before. And that would change the whole discussion on a fundamental level anyways. So, in my eyes it is a moot point. Along with some areas just being unable to produce enough energy to support the rest when needed. Eg.: During the northern hemisphere winter, solar output would be quite a bit lower.

And that is before even getting into the losses of transportation.

International power grid? Do you mean intercontinental? Solar exposure is definitely correlated across nearby countries, and I assume so is wind.

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.

How is Germany a good example? Renewables were less than 20% 10 years ago and are now more than 50%. Meanwhile it has one of the most stable electricity network.

https://www.energy-charts.de/energy_pie_de.htm?year=2020

The 50% is for peak renewable usage. To keep grid stability, Germany depends a lot on French nuclear power plants, imports from elsewhere (usually not green), and ridiculously dirty lignite power plants with natural gas for load following.

And they are building more and more gas power plants and can't really decrease the amount of dirty coal (lignite fueled power plants make other coal-fired power plants look clean)

Did you actually look at the link that I posted? Those are the numbers for all of 2020.

Germany doesn’t depend on French nuclear power. Germany was a net exporter to France in many of the last years. Many neighboring countries have even higher percentage of renewables (Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Norway which is connected via nord.link).

Even though I would have shit down fossil fuel power plants before nuclear, Germany still manages to decrease fossil energy use in their energy mix: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei:Energi...

Those are average values with shortest timespan being full 24hour days. Which don't show daily slumps in production, nor issues with overproduction at times.

Germany is net exporter in general, but that's again - net. If you look, right now as I am writing this Germany is importing ~294 MW of power from France.

> Which don't show daily slumps in production, nor issues with overproduction at times.

The atmosphere doesn't care. Less CO2 is less CO2.

>If you look, right now as I am writing this Germany is importing ~294 MW of power from France.

I think you're missing the entire point of a continental grid. The 294MW are a sign of cooperation, not of failure. If no country imports or exports energy then we could just get rid of the European grid.

What I'm complaining about is that energy transfer already runs into issues, and the weather differences might be not big enough to allow feeding a slump in wind/solar production at one end of EU with renewables from the other side.

Even with continental grid, we don't eradicate the chaotic nature of many renewable sources, which increases the strain on the system.

Germany imports much of its electricity, which often isn’t generated from renewable resources.

Germany is a net energy exporter of 36.6 TWh last year.

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/153533/umfrag...

I can't read German so it's hard to consider this source. That said, it doesn't square with other sources I've seen that show Germany importing >50% of it's electricity, much of which is generated from fossil fuels:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-dependen...

Germany produces much of electricity itself and imports some.

I don't see why not. Renewables are already cheaper than nuclear. The only issue is the fact that it is intermittent and we don't have cheap enormous batteries yet. But that can probably be solved by over-provisioning, long distance HVDC power lines, and gas power stations as backup.

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.

I can't quite figure out why you think it is interesting, so I'll post a reply to my top 2 guesses at what you mean:

1) If you think that the disaster should be considered, I don't see why you think my view is interesting. I'm arguing we should just chalk it up to bad safety practices, which does happen from time to time. If we assume one Fukushima every 20-25 years (which seems absurdly pessimistic given that all the new designs are much safer than Fukushima from the get go and it took somethign close to a 1:500 year disaster to breach Fukushima's design) then the cost-benifits are still in nuclear's favour. A nuclear catastrophe is less damaging than business-as-usual for coal. Living next to a coal plant will have detectable negative health impacts in the community due directly to the coal plant. Living next to Fukushima - even up to the meltdown - won't. The economic consequences of owning property in the exclusion zone probably even that up, but I would still want to see the stats before accepting Fukushima is worse. Coal dust is nasty stuff.

2) If you think that the disaster was nearly prevented and should be discounted on that basis; that is a bad argument and you should abandon it. The disaster did happen and that needs to be dealt with.

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?

I highly recommend "Probability Theory" by E.T. Jaynes. Don't be fooled by the generic title - the book is my Bible for reasoning with uncertainty.

> In my opinion, this book is a required read for anyone who wishes to understand precisely how the scientific worldview is, in a mathematically defensible sense, the best possible worldview, the one that lets us optimally use evidence to develop an interlocked Bayesian network of evidence supported beliefs that can change and evolve as the evidence is accumulated. It also shows the critical connections between physics and statistical mechanics and Shannon's theorem in computational information theory, laying the foundation for a fair bit of modern physics as it demonstrates that physical entropy and information entropy are very much one and the same thing, from a certain point of view.

professional poker

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

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