Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

If we did that for fossil (and other) fuels, you’d bet they would cost more too.

What about decommissioning costs?

Fukushima is a good example of costs from a normal accident we can expect from time to time. Costs are at 200b USD and rising, and they still don't have the reactor site under control.

Even normal decommissioning is incredibly expensive and usually covered by governments and ignored in the costs of electricity.

https://nuclear-news.net/2020/09/24/9-1-2-years-after-meltdo...

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...

Nuclear fusion (if we ever get to commercial production), will make nuclear much more attractive again though and cut decommissioning costs a bit (though there is still the question of how to deal with reactor parts).

Her other brother came to the world deformed, which again happened to more mothers than hers. In my school class (~30 kids) alone there were 4 kids who had deformations or other mutations that affected their life's negatively (for those who still live: to this day). All of them were born in the years after the fallout.

In my region you are still adviced not to eat certain mushrooms or the meat of boars.

Not to speak that one death and one deformed child that needs life long attention does something to the families tho whom such things happen.

Of course all of it is incredibly hard to attribute this to Chernobyl, but the region which got the brink of the radioactive rain (southern Bavaria, southern Austria) had the most of such cases to such a degree that the doctors noticed it.

That being said: of course a lot improved after Chernobyl in terms of reactor safety. But nuclear is still a business, where a (not insignificant) part of the costs linked to waste and potential catastrophes aren't carried by those who earn the money.

So whether nuclear really is affordable depends on how you do the accounting — how much you get the public, the environment and by future generations to carry for free.

E.g. how much does it cost to store 1 kg of nuclear waste safely for 10 000 years? Is that cost prized into the cost of the produced electricity or do we expect future generations to carry it even after all uranium has been burned?

Please convince me that nuclear isn't a Ponzi-scheme on the future generations.

Compete against fossil fuels? No, but neither can solar and wind. Nuclear power also loses out against solar and wind in the very short term, and depending on the geography. Solar is cheap until you saturate the energy market during peak generation hours. Adding storage into the mix creates costs an order of magnitude larger than nuclear. We don't have a plan to decarbonize the electricity sector with solar and wind that doesn't involve a massive breakthrough in energy storage.

The reality is that the only proven ways of powering nations with carbon-free energy are either geographically dependent (hydroelectricity and geothermal power) and nuclear. Nuclear also provides additional benefits in the form of things like desalination with the waste heat - which is going to be highly in demand as climate change ramps up- and thermochemical hydrogen production, which is likely our best method of decarbonizing shipping.

Oh don't forget the other issue: It takes decades to build a new plant. We don't got that time.

For the $6 Billion or more it takes to build a nuclear plant that will then take 15 to 20 years to license and build before it generates a single Watt, we could have had a $6 Billion of solar and wind deployed and operating for 12+ years already.

Nuclear had it's day and it's over. At this point subsidizing it is just creating a mess so that we can give money to GE et al for providing something that--thanks to technology--has no value. If you really want to, just give GE the money directly so that we won't have to bother decommissioning some disaster decades from now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

Nuclear energy is and always has been inherently competitive on total profitability over the course of a plant's lifetime.

The main issue is the time it takes to get a plant built, and the heavy upfront investment. Both of these extend painfully the time before investors reach nonnegative ROI, which is (imo) part of why despite the actual profitability being much better human investors with inherently limited lifetimes opt for, for example, natural gas or solar installations.

+ Also of course, nuclear is much more heavily regulated than other sources of energy, which leads to good things like reduced accident deaths, but also heavily increases cost and time to build.

1. https://imgur.com/a/4mAlUbO

That statement is true, but you are overlooking that fact that the reason nuclear power kills so few people is because we focus so much on the risks.

I have seen very few comments (if any) on HN that are critical of nuclear and offer thoughtful solutions on how to bring the cost down.

If can tell a coal plant kills X people per year, then I can pretty safely deduce it will kill somewhere between 0.9X and 1.1X people next year. (Made up numbers, but the point holds)

For nuclear, we can easily estimate with the same models the damage. One miscalculation, or one disastrous outcome can cause 50000 deaths, or turn the entirety of New York City to radiated ground that has to be avoided for decades.

As long as the extrapolations for nuclear are prone to extreme outcomes, nuclear is more unpredictable and therefore has more danger potential. This is why small nuclear reactors which fail independently are the way to turn nuclear plants into common energy source. They can reduce our fragility to extreme Chernobyl like outcomes.

So, in order to be able to do a large roll-out of nuclear power, you need to:

1) Find a location where building a plant is viable and from where you will be able to transmit the produced energy to it's indended destination.

2) Convince the public that the plant won't render their home uninhabitable.

3) Convince the public that the plant won't result in more environtal damage in their back yard compared to someone else's back yard.

4) Convince the authorities to give you a permits for new plants.

5) Convince the authorities that you're the right one to build it, because they WILL have an issue if you involve people seen as political opponents, say a business from another power block.

5) Convince someone that it's OK if you dig down depleted fuel in their back yard for 100,000 years.

6) Convince the authorities that that it's OK to dig down that depleted fuel in someones back yard for 100,000 years.

Now, if you fail any of those things, then your new shiny plant will most likely never be constructed. Even if you do make it, you still need to compete with solar/wind/storage to make ends meet, while a semi-monopoly sold by the state to private investors in the 90's is still sitting on the huge dam built in the 20's, and can churn out base power from it considerably cheaper.

After all, it's not their problem if your local power grid is to weak to handle all that energy being sent through the entire country through one single line built in the 50's. You should have thought of that beforce you decided to replace your coal plant with a nuclear one!

End result: the owner of the local grid gets the blame and everyone switches to solar because the government is trying to stimulate the market and no matter how inefficient and insufficient it may or may not be compared to your nuclear plant, a solar panel on the roof is preferable to a nuclear power plant for many, many people.

I'm sure there will be new nuclear plants built in the future too. Not many though -- the situation's too messed up for that.

I worked in energy for 5 years. Deaths per TWh was not a metric we measured. Deaths are not made acceptable because of energy production. The goal was zero. We did not reach that goal, but nobody ever said deaths would be OK if only the numbers went up.

Is it though? It seems countries are quite willing to build new nuclear power plants, but nobody wants them in their backyard.

We are still using basically 1960 tech, that's why its expensive. As Elon Musk pointed out often, what matters is pace of innovation.

Nuclear has a pace of innovation that is almost inperceptable. The reasons are that its almost impossible for a startup to do anything, without 10s of millions or better 100s you don't even have to start. The existing reactors last for 60-100 years, so if the country built some in the 1970-1980, it might be enough for multible generations.

You don't have a large industry that can substain itself on building reactors. Industry basically makes money with the fuel dilivery, but those companies have no insentive to innovate on the reactor.

You can not even build a prototype or experimete. A university level research reactor is not enough to validate a real reactor. And the only other thing is a full commercial reactor.

This means companies are forced to develop everything on paper, long before they even get some uranium to play with. That is an insnaly difficult way to build anything, compare that to SpaceX Starship development.

I am a huge fan of nuclear, and we really did have the technology in the 1970 to basically solve climate change as France basically showed. I believe one 'gigafactory' that mass produces small or medium reactors and a appropritae fuel cycle would be by far the cheapest long term solution. Sadly I see no way how we can get to that situation, a single sighting project takes many, many years.

Also, the concept of 'baseload' is dead. If you only produce when renewables are not needed you are in a horrible market situation. Even if you wanted to be dynamic, current tech can't be. This is not an issue with nuclear in general, but the current generation. A load following nuclear reactor is possible, but even that will simply lead to an underutilized resource.

That is why companies like Moltex Energy are designing their reactor more like CSP installation. Where the nuclear reactor has a 'heat-battery' and multible CCGT so that when there is money to be made, you actually triple the output of the reactor for when prices are high. It also leads to the nuclear part of the investment being only like 30% and the rest is known cost, but of course it requries a pretty large scale of project to work.

All in all, I hope the best for nuclear, it would have been the right solution, but its unfortunate history and properties just didn't fit in socity correctly for many reasons. I hope by the end of the decade we have some advanced nuclear, but unfortunatly I now beleive the majority of 'green' energy will have to come from gathering up wind and solar power on massive scale, plus Terrafactories worth of battery production with some gas backup plants.

Nuclear energy researches were stagnant for many, many years - anything "atomic" was considered to be "non-green", and green movements were fighting nuclear energy vigorously, as a result there were not much research done in this area - working on that was a dangerous career choice, people who did that were treated like Holocaust deniers, people who do researches on differences between races or try to cure homosexuality.

Another "success" of ecologist was that they've managed to scare people. As a result finding location for nuclear plant is very hard, there are protests, people do everything to stop building plants in the area, so there is huge cost associated with paying compensations.

Fun fact: in early '90 there was a plan to build nuclear plant in Poland, obviously it was heavily protested, Greenpeace and friends arrived, do their usual stuff like chaining to to whatever they could, etc. The project was abandoned (first government after fall of communism was reluctant to act heavy-handed), however, believe or not, 30 years later people leaving near the planned location still put on their houses "stop atom" banners. I would not believe that myself I hadn't seen them. So instead of having clean energy Poland keeps emitting CO2 (not that the amount is even comparable to Germany emission or other more developed countries, but still).

Cost is also a matter of scale. France, which relays on nuclear energy a lot, managed to make it feasible with a great effect for both economy and environment.

The only reason it costs so much is precisely because everyone is paranoid, so we demand expensive security systems and protocols. If the regulators got out of the way you could probably put one together for a few million dollars.

Nuclear has the possibility for point-scale accidents to render large areas permanently uninhabitable. Given the fallibility of human social organizations point scale accidents are guaranteed in all domains. Therefor using nuclear power is conceding areas will be rendered uninhabitable. As we saw with the Chernobyl near miss and since, these areas may be as large as a continent in the case the point scale accident is bad.

Note all of this changes if nuclear technology is fail-safe. Examples include the fusion-seeded fission model, and the candlestick reactor model. Technology here is severely underfunded in interest of fail-deadly technologies more likely to be implemented and yield profit in the short term, even if we’re running huge risks by adopting them.

In the era of Covid where we see how badly our social systems can fail, the hand wavy attitude toward nuclear is simply appalling.

Countries like the Netherlands that don't have the space for sufficient on-shore wind have to go to off-shore wind, which is actually more expensive than nuclear energy.

With nuclear we'd be making faster progress instead of fighting residents and nature preservation for every plot of land again and again, auctioning land leases for every few megawatts, and it all just taking forever (basically how the rollout is going in most countries right now). But in the end it's cheaper yeah! Just that we can take more than a decade to build a few plants and we'll still be faster than with only wind and solar (exception: if you're in a country with water and significant height differences, by all means choose that over nuclear). Let's first get CO2-neutral, which is an asap job, with any means not more expensive than off-shore wind (we're building that anyway so apparently anything cheaper will do) and then worry about how to get to a final, perfect state.

This is a grossly naive and over-simplistic way to judge safety and efficacy. Yes, perhaps fewer people die in a major accidents, but then you've left a large swath of land unusable for hundreds or thousands of years. And the cost for managing the disasters is astronomical. In a place like Japan, they lose a not insignificant portion of landmass to an accident. While other forms of energy may overall cause more deaths, it's been distributed across everyone evenly. And apparently this is considered an better outcome, because that is precisely the policy we are taking with Covid. I'd make a bet that by the end of this pandemic, the amount of suffering and death caused by the lockdowns will be more than from Covid itself, when you consider the massive economic failure of small business, children in isolation for so long, depression, overdoses, suicide, domestic abuse, diseases not being diagnosed or treated, civil unrest, etc. It's considered a good policy to share the suffering across everyone to avoid a few directly attributable deaths of compromised individuals.

edit: I'd be curious if anyone was willing to refute my statement rather than downvote it. I strongly believe what I say but am a big supporter of critical thought and would love for someone to challenge my statement and give me a reason to think otherwise.

2. Countries like the Netherlands that don't have the space for sufficient on-shore wind have to go to off-shore wind, which is actually more expensive than nuclear energy.

3. We'd be making actual progress instead of fighting residents and nature preservation for every plot of land again and again, auctioning land leases for every few megawatts, and it all just taking forever (basically how the rollout is going in most countries right now). But in the end it's cheaper yeah! Just that we can take more than a decade to build a few plants and we'll still be faster than with only wind and solar (exception: if you're in a country with water and significant height differences, by all means choose that over nuclear). Let's first get CO2-neutral, which is an asap job, with any means not more expensive than off-shore wind (we're building that anyway so apparently anything cheaper will do) and then worry about how to get to a final, perfect state.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/14/just-a-m...

A few numbers: the projected cost is $20 billion. The nameplate capacity is 10GW. The most efficient solar plant in the world (located in Arizona) has an efficiency of about 30%, and I think we can assume similar efficiency for the Australian one, which translates to a 3GW average output, assuming it includes enough giant batteries to stabilize the output. The size of the array, in one of the most favourable places in the world by climatic conditions, is 150Km^2 (more or les the size of Amsterdam). Note that in the Australian desert we can assume the cost of the land to be almost zero.

Always according to WP, the cost of nuclear per GW should be about $6 billion. So a 3GW nuclear power plant should cost about the same as the 3GW (in average output) solar array. The difference is that the power output of a nuclear plant is steady and entirely predictable, it occupies a minimal fraction of the space needed by the solar array, and it can work anywhere in the world- from Australia to the coldest and rainiest regions. Transferring the Sun Cable project from the Australian desert to Germany is simply impossible due to the climate and the cost of land; while it's perfectly possible to build in Germany ten or twenty 3GW nuclear plants.

IMHO nuclear could actually work but it will need a much more ambitious agenda than merely matching price levels of already too expensive gas plants. Fusion is the interesting thing to keep an eye on. Perpetually decades out but it at least offers the right orders of magnitude improvements we actually need; on paper.

> once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind.

Ah right that must be why electricity costs in Germany are so high and so low in France LOL

And storage is mostly unsolved problem at scale. Nobody in the world ever built GWh size battery.

So supporting solar means you're either suggesting going with stuff that doesn't exist (and might as well go with fusion then, right?) or you're basically supporting fossil fuels.

Unless you assume France's nuclear plants are still benefiting from taxpayers' funding decades after they were built, the market has proven that nuclear power is far cheaper than wind and solar.

A 7 hour flight gives you 1/5th (.02 mSv- 2000x daily background exposure) as much as a chest xray and 1/350th as much as a chest CT. They're only similar if you fly relatively often, and if you get any kind of CT you need to fly a LOT to make them comparable.

Your example also under-rates the danger of xrays compared to flying under models that are suspected to be more realistic than current linear threshold. If acute doses are worse than spread out doses, the xray is even worse than the plane.

As a child, you would have gotten even less radiation from a flight. An xray exposes you to roughly the same dose, since the image is confined to a specific spot on your body. Everybody gets the dose delivered to a roughly 1'x1' area, yadda yadda. On a flight, every part of your body receives more radiation- so a 50 lb child will get 1/4th as much radiation as a 200 lb adult. If they get an xray, a smaller area needs to be exposed... but not 1/4 the size. It's actually related to the square-cube law, since the image is cross-sectional but dose delivery depends on volume.

https://www.xrayrisk.com/faq.php

My skin in the treatment area held up fine until the last week when it basically gave up, so I’m looking forward to a couple of weeks of applying gel and changing bandages...

So even quite moderate exposures can have significant effects, I can’t imagine what this would be like across my whole body.

Local peasants get in, take some pretty glowing things back home, apply the stuff as makeup, and die horrible deaths. When the family tries to bury their daughter in the town cemetery, the rest of the town marches in protest.

Clearly, the lesson is that we should stop building... hospitals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Like just go through this list and count the number of times water was a good chunk of the problem.

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

There are multiple options that don't have this issue. For instance, if you use liquid lead the thing can sit around indefinitely with no active cooling. In fact you have the opposite problem, you need to keep heating the lead to prevent the whole reactor pool from freezing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-cooled_fast_reactor

There might not even be enough lithium on the planet to support all of this, who knows.

Relying on something unproven to swoop in and save us ... might as well wait for fusion, right? In the end, what you're doing is extending the reign of fossil fuels and destroying the world.

These are all problems for which we have reasonable technical solutions (ex: Yucca mountain was a GREAT solution for nuclear waste storage until breeder reactors come online). The problem is in the politics and planning.

France in the past very succesfully and quickly built a lot of reactors. They massively reduced their CO2 footprint. So it can be done.

Your information is very misleading, very.

The quote come from the minister of the ecological transition, not 'energy minister', whose official duty is, quoting wikipedia 'responsible for preparing and implementing the French government’s policy in the fields of sustainable development, climate, energy transition, and biodiversity.'

This new minister has a political degree (Science Po), no technological background, and is member of the local pro-ecological party since 2000.

Of course she's referring to EPR as a mess, which is true in a certain way, but in her mind it's just a political stance she's feeling obligated to say publicly.

Of course the EPR is a giant project, maybe too giant, of course it was underestimated in order to get it going, and of course it takes much longer to be built than every one would want.

But that's the price of technological advancement, that's how we learn to build better things.

And what's the alternative? 1650MWe of wind turbines, where would you put it?

It is simple. There are cheaper and quicker, and lots less risky ways to decarbonize generation.

That's a position that can be argued for and defended while being entirely coherent though (although it's not one that I'm particularly thrilled to run towards).

Can anyone who feels this way delete their account? I'm genuinely tired of your shtick.

If we talk about Western Sahara, those coasts are strategic areas for the economy of the planet and many big companies operate there.

My bet is that anybody enough silly to treat the huge fisheries, strategic maritime routes moving oil and raw materials, and the touristic areas adjacent in the Canary Islands, EU just with the purpose to build one nuclear plant would be sued to death and buried in a coffin of law papers. The boycott level would be insane.

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

It is used for research, and produce Technetium-99m that is used for nuclear medicine for scintigraphy.

No, because the marginal increase at low doses, as seen in the natural background, under LNT is so low that it's not statistically visible.

The evidence we have is even consistent with models in which the effect/dose at low exposures is HIGHER than in LNT (for example, if there are repair mechanisms that are induced at sufficiently high doses.) Advocates of hormesis don't point out that a concave downward curve at low doses that this sort of effect might produce would increase the number of cancers from a nuclear accident, vs. what the LNT would predict.

No, it’s not. It might not be accurate, but to my knowledge the linear-no-threshold model is still subject to support and opposition from various bodies.

- Bad diet: for example red meat increases risk of colorectal cancer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4698595/

- physical activity reduces the risk of many cancers. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/o...

- overweight people have a higher risk of cancer. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/o...

- alcohol increases risk of head and neck, oesophageal, liver, breast, colorectal caner and many others . https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...

In fact, even Fukushima there were human (stupid) mistakes:

- the levee was too low, and the regulator told TEPCO they needed to improve it (which they didn't). Interestingly enough, the exact same issue (too small levee, leading to loss of all power and water supply) happened in France in CPNE du Blayais in 1999, and in this case also the regulator told EDF that their levee was too low, with no reaction…

- a valve was automatically closed (which is the standard behavior in case of shutdown) but the Japanese operators weren't aware of this behavior, so they believed the valve was still open. When they realized it, it was too late. Opening this valve would have given several hours more of cooling water to the reactor, which could have been enough to save it because help came only a little too late.

Main takeaway: humans are going to do stupid things, which in case of nuclear will eventually lead to a disaster every once in a while. The question raised by the article, is “how much of a disaster is it really” and “do we really need to evacuate a entire region when things like this happen”.

If the answer is “yes” (which is what's commonly accepted) then nuclear is probably too risky to be reasonable (for instance, if CPNE de Nogent sur Seine suffered a critical failure, Paris and the entire Île-de-France region, which concentrate most of the French economic power, would need to be evacuated).

But if the answer is “no”, and the actual risk from contamination (not irradiation actually…) is actually comparable or even lower than regular air pollution or other pollutants, then maybe nuclear is fine, even if we admit that dramatic events will inevitably occur.

Dams fail. Rockets fail. Medical devices fail. Do you see any that doesn’t fail, whatever the cause is ?

It’s natural to assume power plant at some point will fail. If we’re fine losing a gigantic living area for half a century each time a plant fails, perhaps you are right. But looking at Fukushima that doesn’t seem like a tradeoff people are fine with.

Being anxious based on the past failures is not totally justified as the environmental cost and dangers from pollution are much, much greater for existing non-renewable energy sources than nuclear even factoring in Chernobyl, Fukushima, etc. The number of fatalities and injuries from those versus their power output makes them safer than coal.

The real problem is that the public conscious is turned against nuclear because of its association with weapons and the decades that environmentalist groups have spent protesting against it, ironically.

The problem with the current nuclear technology is that one disaster is way too many. The power plants need to fail more gracefully to have the support of the people that are less fascinated by the tech.

When the tsunami hits or experiment goes wrong you should be able the have a huge monetary loss and forget about what happened in a week. Not heroes sacrificing their lives to save the humanity and sarcophagus build with international collaboration. Not a land that is no-go zone for who knows how long.

Yes, nuclear power is fascinating and it’s very neat when it works but it’s too much of a commitment for many people.

And the death per kwh stats are ridiculous. Deaths of terrorist are way lower than most killers. Deaths due to mafia are very low compared to fatty cheese. Deaths due to serial killers are very low compared to kitchen accidents.

This is a non sequitur. The conclusion does not follow from the premise.

Notable I'm starting to see residential HVAC equipment and EV battery chargers that tie directly to solar panels.

https://www.iter.org/sci/Fusion