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Comment by sto_hristo | Hacker News Reader

Everything around the nuclear disasters has been a human bullshit of a problem, not a technological one. Probably with the exception of Fukushima, where all the conditions were put into the extreme - killer earthquake and monster tsunami. Being anxious about it is more than justified, especially with idiotic countries in mind.

But that doesn't mean we need to abandon it. Nuclear is the future and there is no debate about it - energy density of the fuel is unmatched. It's becoming safer and safer and with the introduction of modular built reactors, the cost and time to market metrics will go down. Whether is fission or fusion - that remains to be seen...

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Problem is that you don’t get to opt out of the “human bullshit”. Nuclear power comes with a massive and unavoidable cost from these matters.

Does it, though? A large portion can definitely be avoided with design and technology. Chernobyl happened because it was a positive feedback loop, in the West it was an obsolete design even before it was built. And Fukushima was quite literally acts of god (in the actuarial sense.)

As an equal analogy - why can't we design our way out of governments having lots of "human bullshit" problems? If you can answer that question, you solve a much bigger problem than energy.

Yes, it does. Humans lie and cheat and steal and misrepresent. Contractors use inappropriate materials or cut corners. Regulators demand unreasonable operational constraints because of political pressure. Insurers demand unaffordable costs. Protestors fight construction because of unfounded fears. Political stasis prevents sensible waste management strategies. And so on.

I absolutely think it would be possible to build a safe future on nuclear power - in an ideal world. But the world is very very far from ideal; the impression I get is that that effort which would be required to actually deliver a modern nuclear strategy is unattainable.

It doesn't matter if you have a new design if you don't deploy it. The Fukushima plant was older than the Chernobyl plant. One could have simply decided to replace it with a newer design. In hindsight if Japan's government didn't have to pay for the Fukushima cleanup they could have done more sensible things, like update the entire nuclear fleet. It certainly would have been cheaper to tear all nuclear plants in Japan down and build new ones when you look at the cost overruns at Fukushima.

Whereas with lovely coal and oil we get to ignore the problem. It's just smoke until... Catastrophic climate feedback loops, mass extinction, hundreds of millions of climate migrants escaping uninhabitable parts of earth, coral and shellfish disappear in acidic oceans, entire ecosystems collapse and etc etc. But nuclear had costs. Sure. But we could at least begin to calculate those costs.

Why does the answer always reply with coal and oil instead of Renewables and storage?

If you’re German for one, then it’s justified, because Merkel has been shutting down nuclear plants which forced a switch back to more coal.

Then why isn't the argument that Germany should build more solar and wind generation? Nuclear plants take decades from start to finish - if they even finish in the West. Vs months to a few years for many renewable projects.

Because the plants are finished and working. They just shut them down.

Nuclear plants have a lifetime of 30ish years. Many are getting shutdown now because the first wave of builds was around 30-50 years ago. The risks of continuing to operate older designs gets higher if they're refurbished.

Sure, but newer designs were shut down too. I used to live basically next to one. It was in construction for years, very close to completion when Fukushima happened. It was definitely not a rational reaction to cancel that thing.

Becayse germany has been very rapidly ramping up wind and solar, and still they are struggling to replace the reactors. They have made no progress in decarbonising the grid because rhey've been replacing one zero-carbon source with another zero carbon source, instead of removing coal.

Germany has cut coal use in half since the wind-down of the nuclear fleet began. Please do not repeat misinformation.

And they would have cut it to zero by now if they left nuclear plants alone.

That is factully incorrect. Even if Germany had left nuclear on a level of 1995 and replaced aging plants with new plants of the same capcity the net nuclear output combined with renewables would not be enough to offset coal/gas/oil. See https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromerzeugung

This graph seems to show that coal would have been gone by now.

What I getting wrong?

That’s misinformation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany

You can clearly see how coal is on the rise shortly after 2010. So it is factually true to say they switched back to coal. You would be correct to point out that coal use has gone down since, but not by half. Not even close.

Let’s use German industry data[1]

    Fuel        2010  2019  (TWH)
    Lignite    145.9 113.9
    Hard Coal  117.0  57.3
    Nuclear    140.6  75.1
    Renewables 105.2 244.3
    Natural Gas 89.3  91.0

That’s as of 9 months ago. Since Lignite generation dropped 22% in 2019 alone, and Anthracite 30%, we can expect it is even lower today. I make it about 35% by the 2010-2019 numbers, so true, not 50%, but it does in no way support any kind of statement that “coal use has gone up”. Just the opposite.

[1] https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/index.php?article_id=29&fileNa...

Your numbers also show that coal use went up by several TWh shortly after the Energiewende. I'll concur that the numbers improved much faster than I would have expected based on what I had in mind from previous years. But they still went up.

Anyone who describes the Energiewende nuclear draw down as having caused coal consumption to rise is propagating misinformation.

While there may be some small, tightly qualified way in which the statement can be twisted to be true the impression that is conveyed is one that is in conflict with the facts.

Misinformation often uses small truths to tell larger lies.

> Anyone who describes the Energiewende nuclear draw down as having caused coal consumption to rise is propagating misinformation.

Anyone who does that would be factually correct, as proven by your own numbers. And this accusation is especially ironic coming from someone who made a factually incorrect statement.

> there may be some small, tightly qualified way in which the statement can be twisted to be true

It was true for several years and for several TWh. It's not at all fair to call that "twisted and tightly qualified".

If you don't think so, note that from 2010 until now, the length of time in which coal use was elevated is about the same as the length of time where it decreased. So if my statement is twisted and tightly qualified, then so is your statement that coal use has been reduced by 35%. Not to mention your initial claim that it's been cut in half.

> the impression that is conveyed is one that is in conflict with the facts.

Since you insist, I'll amend my statement: getting out of nuclear forced an increase in coal use for several years.

But the main point remains untouched. From a climate standpoint, Germany would've been strictly better off with nuclear.

Because you cannot simply replace conventional rotational generators with inverters. The inertia of the turbomachinery smooths out fluctuations in the grid keeping it stable. Lots of details in [0].

So without lots of hydro or synchronous wind generation, there will always been a need for some kind of conventional generation to keep the grid stable.

0. https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/2019/10/25/grid-inertia...

I'm no expert, but I did find this[1] recent (May 2020) information posted by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab that indicates that non-inverted power sources (such as solar and wind) may be able to produce synthetic current frequency in order to maintain grid stability. This technology can be included within large-scale storage batteries.

In addition, these inertial techniques ('fast frequency response') are digital and as a result could provide lower-latency and higher-accuracy response compared to mechanical approaches.

If I understand that correctly, then eventually these approaches could phase out the need for rotational inertia (no pun intended).

[1] - https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2020/inertia-and-the-power...

Edit: adding a useful quote from the linked report, below:

"In the United States, the Texas grid (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT) is the smallest of three main grids. ERCOT’s relatively small size, combined with its large wind deployment, has required it to compensate for declining inertia by adopting several low-cost solutions, including allowing fast-responding noncritical loads to respond to changes in frequency. This has enabled ERCOT to achieve increasingly high instantaneous wind penetrations—reaching a record of 58% in 2019—while maintaining reliability."

If you're building a grid-scale battery storage system, isn't it a relatively straightforward engineering problem to emulate the inertia of a flywheel?

I would be much more concerned about batteries' ability to respond on the days/weeks/months scale than the milliseconds scale.

What challenges do you foresee in responding over days/weeks/months?

The challenge is just having enough raw capacity to meet demand using intermittent renewable sources. Weather varies on the scale of days/weeks, and winter is cold because of limited sunlight. What energy source will we use to stay warm all winter?

Make hydrogen, store it underground, and have enough combustion turbines available to back up the grid. A simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is about 5% of the cost of a nuclear power plant, per unit of power output.

That seems physically plausible, though it would be a lot easier if we could make methane efficiently, because we already have the infrastructure to transport and burn it.

The problem then is where do you get the carbon to make the methane. Ammonia might be a possibility, if it can be kept from escaping (toxic) or dissolving in underground water.

Yet another possibility is underground storage of high temperature heat, artificial geothermal, if you will. But it would have to be extractable with cheap equipment. Perhaps it could be used to superheat hydrogen for injection into those combustion turbines.

Making hydrogen via electrolysis is very lossy though.. it's only worth it if you have nothing else to burn the power on.

Or if you need a chemical energy store with very low $/kWh of storage capacity, for long term or rarely used storage. There, the efficiency penalty is much less important than it would be for rapidly cycling diurnal storage.

For the last 40 years, that has been the actual alternative.

Can you imagine where we'd be if we had continued pursuing the nuclear future? A largely decarbonized grid, advanced reactor designs deployed, knock-on effects from plentiful power, etc. What would the CO2 levels look like now? But no, instead we're now at a crisis point...

Because we need truly fantastic levels of storage to make renewables even remotely feasible. The US has 8 seconds of battery storage, and ~4 minutes of hydroelectric storage. We need 12 hours of storage to get to 80% renewable generation, and 3 weeks of storage to get to 100% renewable generation [1]. And even if we did go this route, we'd still need to cover 3-5% of the landmass of the Earth with solar panels to achieve this.

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

There have been many studies since 2018 that say areas where they previously thought it would be difficult to get to 80%, that would be perfectly feasible to get to 100% with near term technologies. See Austrailian grid analysis. The key difference is that the prices for both renewables and storage are far ahead of cost reduction estimates in previous forcasts.

Australia has vast tracts of cheap land and very good solar potential (close to equator, little cloud cover). They also have energy usage patterns that are amenable to solar, with ACs run during the day and little need for heating at night. Most countries do not share these characteristics.

And I'd still like to see what they have planned for energy storage. It likely still involves shifting demand (in other words, they can't actually fulfill demand and they have to tell people not to use electricity during certain times of day).

That seems to have improved greatly in a years time. The speed with which renewable sources come one line I think is surprising everyone.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/08/31/renewables-improve-re...

Because nobody has put forth any workable plan to provide the storage capacity needed to rely on solar or wind.

Nobody said otherwise. What point are you trying to make?

Those costs are negligible compared to climate change.

Fukushima every 5 years for next 1000 years, or gradually leaking long term nuclear waste, are several orders of magnitude less harmful for humanity or life on earth than climate change.

But investing in wind, solar and storage would be much cheaper still. The fukushima cleanup effort has cost close to $100 billion. Imagine where we could take renewable and energy storag tech with that level of investment.

How do you know that the storage investment will produce something viable? Investments still have risk and nuclear can fill that hole.

It's true that there's always risk involved. As we know, that is true for nuclear as much as any other energy technology.

My view on this is that we are not particularly far away from this being viable even with 2020 technology. And that this is especially true if we are creative in how we apply technology, for example by decentralising the grid and installing storage capacity in people's homes, and by being aggressive with load shifting to reduce the storage capacity required. And there are dozens of promising new energy storage technologies. It seems unlikely that none of them pan out. I thus consider the risk of going all-in on renewables fairly low.

Sure, but the stakes are human existence on the planet. I don't know why you would turn away from solutions we already have with boundable risk.

Because I consider the renewables solution to have comparably bounded risk.

It's still not clear what basis you're bounding that risk on—it seems like optimism that one of the investments would pay off. I would strongly prefer pessimism in this case!

Just looked up some numbers from Wikipedia:

"Japan had 282 GW of total installed electricity generating capacity in 2010"

"A 2010 study by the Japanese government (pre-Fukushima disaster), called the Energy White Paper,[citation needed] concluded the cost for kilowatt hour was ¥49 for solar, ¥10 to ¥14 for wind, and ¥5 or ¥6 for nuclear power.

Masayoshi Son, an advocate for renewable energy, however, has pointed out that the government estimates for nuclear power did not include the costs for reprocessing the fuel or disaster insurance liability. Son estimated that if these costs were included, the cost of nuclear power was about the same as wind power.[49][50][51]

More recently, the cost of solar in Japan has decreased to between ¥13.1/kWh to ¥21.3/kWh (on average, ¥15.3/kWh, or $0.142/kWh).[52] "

And:

"Photovoltaic prices have fallen from $76.67 per watt in 1977 to nearly $0.102 per watt in October 2019, for multi crystalline silicon solar cells and module price to $0.21 per watt."

so ~10W/$ for photovoltaic gives 1TW for $100 billion, about four times larger than the 2010 installed energy generation capacity.

realistically there will be more costs than just the panels.

10 years ago? It's 2020, wind/solar have dropped by significant percentages every year since then.

Wind/solar are cheaper (LCOE) than everything except natural gas, which it is on parity with right now, and shortly will pass even for installed generation (meaning it will be worth it for electric companies to invest in replacing the natural gas generators)

Yes renewables have gotten cheaper but nuclear isn't outlandishly expensive either.

If it doesn't match expectations and the price doesn't significantly drop further from today (seems unlikely), going nuclear would be a good decision. If renewable continues to drop, we have a bit more expensive power depending on the percentage of nuclear to renewable power. However, if we don't build nuclear, I'm really not sure how much CO2 we're adding to the air and how many more people had to die from pollution before we managed to build enough renewables. If it's ballpark reasonable I don't see that we can afford to wait.

> However, if we don't build nuclear, I'm really not sure how much CO2 we're adding to the air and how many more people had to die from pollution before we managed to build enough renewables

To me the achilles heel in this scheme is how long it takes to build a new nuclear power station. This article [0] says that modern nuclear plants are planned to be built in 5 years (this assumes no time overruns which have been common in practice in recent years). I'm not convinced that nuclear will still be relevant in 5-10 years times once it's actually been built.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...

I'm aware of the building time unfortunately (10-15 years iirc, seems to match what you wrote), but yeah I'm still expecting it'll be helpful to at least plan for a third, maybe half the power to come from nuclear plants. It's not as if we are likely to be using less energy than today, and on top of that we need a tenfold amount as we use today to replace the petajoules currently coming from oil (e.g. for transportation, I don't know the exact uses, just that NL in 2014 used 10x more kWh or mtoe than we produce+import in electrical power).

Looking at how much renewable power we managed to build in the past ten years, we need to ramp it up massively, while at the same time we just did the low hanging fruit in terms of where to build. A video I watched a few days ago mentioned that Germany had been debating over laws regarding the placement of wind turbines. Germany, the big country (to me), where there is still a lot of nature and space (compared to where I'm from, the Netherlands, here I can find a big forest not far from home and housing is also cheaper due to lower demand for the space). Apparently they were debating over a 1000 meter minimum distance between dwellings and a wind turbine for noise reasons, but that would apparently already have left nearly no space. Now it's 300 meters but some states have higher distance requirements and so you see few turbines there. It's a real pickle...

I'm a very enthusiastic LFTR stan that wondered why we weren't full on into Thorium reactor research at the beginning of the Obama administration.

But wind/solar have just changed the face of energy generation.

I agree that in theory, nuclear can provide cheap and plentiful energy in a large number of applications. But in practice it has not, and the regulatory structures and entrenched interests (fuel rod reprocessor companies, US military wanting weapons grade isotopes, NIMBY) simply make it really really hard to do a new reactor.

I think small scale reactors that fit in a shipping container or pallet box is what should be pursued. A "disposable" reactor that can simply be sent back for recycling is the way to go.

As someone else has noted, a new nuclear project is a five year lead time. Look at the improvement curves in solar/wind EROEI / LCOE. Five years will be another annualized 10-20% savings in panels / rotors / batteries. Nuclear won't be able to compete.

When the main curves for solar / wind finally stabilize, then nuclear can probably target something that might be competitive.

Investing nuclear, wind, solar and storage is be cheaper than leaving nuclear out.

Nuclear has it's place in the mix.

You do. US Navy had zero nuclear accidents so far, simply because one Hyman Rickover was able to convince the government that safety overrides everything else.

Unlike the Air Force which accidentally flew two nukes to the wrong state :). But that’s not nuclear power so I suppose you are correct.

And dropped a couple on Spain for good measure.

> US Navy had zero nuclear accidents so far

and here we go again....

"coal energy destroyed zero inhabitable planetary biospheres so far"

Um, are you sure about that? I can think of at least two.

I assume that you're referring to USS Thresher and Scorpion. These weren't nuclear accidents.

> These weren't nuclear accidents.

Of course they were, unless we assume that those nuclear plants were lost on purpose and not accidentally

Anything related with the destruction of a damned nuclear submarine that is lost somewhere in the sea bottom is a nuclear accident, by definition.

Massive compared to what, though? Chernobyl was a catastrophe, but it's also like just a month of driving deaths here in america, or a couple coal plants just doing their thing. None of these are even on the same amount of destruction that climate change will wreak, up to and including possible extinction, something scarier even than a nuclear holocaust. Perhaps you might articulate what the risk you're alluding to is?

Cost is massive indeed, but even in extreme cases like in Chernobyl, it will be offset to non-existence compared to the gains we will reap in the long run if we master this technology.

Remember, that nuclear is still in its early stages. Newer and better designs emerge and we're even still researching fusion.

Early cars were like a death sentence in Texas. But that didn't stop engineers from improving and making them better. What if they said after the first crash - "Screw it, back to horses and carts, this stuff is too dangerous."

> Everything around the nuclear disasters has been a human bullshit of a problem, not a technological one. Probably with the exception of Fukushima, where all the conditions were put into the extreme - killer earthquake and monster tsunami.

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.

>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

Why ? Paris is as far from Nogent NPP (89 km) as Kiev is from Chernobyl NPP, so there's plenty of space to setup an exclusion zone, even in the worst case scenario of an open core meltdown (which are much less probable with Western PWR designs).

This is scaremongering.

> Why ? Paris is as far from Nogent NPP (89 km) as Kiev is from Chernobyl NPP, so there's plenty of space to setup an exclusion zone, even in the worst case scenario of an open core meltdown (which are much less probable with Western PWR designs).

You stopped halfway through in your reasoning: a PWR reactor is less prone to reactor meltdown than an RBMK one, AND the consequences would be different.

Because there's no graphite, there would be no fire, then the radioactive dust cloud would be almost nonexistent. What would happen instead would probably be a Fukushima-like scenario, where tons of contaminated water would end up in the environment. But this time, the environment wouldn't be the gigantic Pacific Ocean, but the Seine river… which crosses Paris and is a major supplier of freshwater for the whole urban area.

You really don't want a catastrophic failure at Nogent!

(You'd have the same issue with CNPE du Bugey and the city of Lyon btw).

But this scenario is much easier to handle than an open core meltdown. The Seine supplies drinking water upstream from Nogent. I guess that must be by design when the siting decision was made.

So even the need to discharge contamination in the Seine wouldn't matter that much. It would forbid some uses of the Seine for a few months.

Containment pools can be readily dug to contain discharge until activity levels decay and to dilute the discharge.

These worst case scenarios have already been gamed through during the plant planning process.

> But this scenario is much easier to handle than an open core meltdown.

It's still not handled in Fukushima yet… And because of that, Fukushima is higher than Chernobyl in terms of radioactive material released in the environment…

> The Seine supplies drinking water upstream from Nogent.

What?

> These worst case scenarios have already been gamed through during the plant planning process.

This is probably why some people won't ever trust nuclear: the feeling of invulnerability conveyed by some nuclear enthusiasts, is just scary.

I'm long on nuclear, I moved from Paris to the middle of nowhere because my wife is working at the local powerplant, I studied nuclear engineering myself in engineering school and even considered it as a career (but I eventually chose software engineering instead). And let me tell you: this argument “These worst case scenarios have already been gamed through during the plant planning process” is bullshit. The plant was designed, then after some bad experience (France and worldwide) security was improved, then computer simulation improved and they discovered other failure possibilities and improved the security again. Then, Fukushima happened, and they discovered huge holes in security (especially when you lose all power supply AND all water supply, which wasn't a scenario deemed plausible before) and they improved security yet again (they created the FARN to have a dedicated emergency response agency, in case everybody else is busy as hell with other issues, and they added new bunkerized and elevated diesel generators to ensure the power is never fully lost).

But we cannot be 100% sure we have everything covered now, and I absolutely wouldn't be surprised if another catastrophic event occurred in the next twenty years somewhere in the world. (And if it happens in France, I'm ready to bet this will be caused by fire, because French safety standards regarding fires are waaay behind UK ones.

I can’t think of a single instance of a technology where we thought that failure wasn’t an option, were supposed to put everything behind it to succeed and had a 100% clear success.

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.

Planning for failure is a core activity in nuclear plant design.

Modern plants could sustain pretty much any failure and no living area would be lost.

including an airliner flying into surface storage next to the plant?

I would not be surprised.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY446h4pZdc

do you have a title so I can check it through DDG? I refuse to click the consent pop-ip on YT...

EDIT: watched. An aeroplane is not a train.

And a dry storage cask is not a transportation cask

1) A train is a nastier impactor than a plane, which is mostly air, soft-ish metal and plastic.

2) What's your point? You can kill way more people by flying an airplane into a building than any nuclear facility.

1) kinetic energy and momentum ... and jet fuel

2) don't ask me what the point is, as long as some people can envision a point to it, it's irresponsible to not avoid such a situation. don't ask me what the point is, ask the hijackers of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Airways_Flight_49

Dry storage casks are embedded in some seriously thick concrete for radiation shielding. I wouldn't be surprised if a direct hit of an A-380 engine at Mach 1 didn't actually destroy it.

Again, if you have a highjacked plane on hand you can cause way more damage by crashing it into a skyscraper than some nuclear waste storage - it's a somewhat different risk but not a greater one.

How thick?

Check out these, with humans for comparison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_dry_storage.jpg

Some 70 cm. That's right, about half of diameter of these cylinders are concrete walls.

For comparison, Schwerer Gustav shells weighed about the same as A380 engine, were mostly hardened solid steel, arrived on target at about Mach 2 and could penetrate some 7 meters of concrete (including the explosive charge).

You can help yourself to a F-4 vs concrete test that doesn't really make a dent in about 1m of concrete.

From that video (F4 vs concrete), the narrator who was present at the test says that ultimately its the energy that counts (wheither you model a detailed plane colliding, or a simple sausage shape of same mass and velocity, turns out you get essentially the same result).

So let's calculate the kinetic energy for the 3 things mentioned: the Phantom F4 II kinetic energy, the Schwerer Gustav shell kinetic energy (I don't know the energy in the explosive charge though) and the A380 kinetic energy:

E = 1/2 * m * v * v (not sure how to use caret in markdown)

Phantom F4 II: 1/2 18,824 kg (770 / 3.6 m / s) (770 / 3.6 m / s) = 430 MJ

Schwere Gustav shell: 1/2 7000 kg 343 m / s 343 m / s = 412 MJ EDIT: this should be 4 x 412 MJ = 1.6 GJ since I forgot to double the speed of sound.

A-380: 1/2 500000 kg ( 945 / 3.6 m / s ) ( 945 / 3.6 m / s ) = 17.226 GJ

where I used 500 tonnes instead of max takeoff weight of 575 tonnes, and V MO of 945 km/h

so thats 40 x more energy than the F4 test...

the F4 test resulted in a 6 cm deep scratch, so naively multiplying by 40 gives 2.4 m , i.e. substantially more than 70 cm (to see it's not that naive, just consider crashing 40 F4's sequentially, they'll dig deeper and deeper)

Your calculation is flawed, probably intentionally.

A-380 is not a shell, it's a soft sausage 70 meters long.

The fuselage collision would be stretched in time, greatly diminishing impact forces. It's large cross-section means it couldn't even focus on a single cask. The 40 F-4s analogy is incorrect again, as the tail of the plane wouldn't be hitting the target, it would be hitting the soft pile of crap from the nose and midsection.

The engine is the only dangerous part as far as collisions against concrete go, and even then not so dangerous.

Again, let's say we got unlucky and the 4 engines of an A-380 breached 4 casks. Would it be bad? Of course. Would it be as bad as 9/11? No way.

The fireball would lift some dust in the air and quickly dilute it. Nuclear fuel is essentially ceramic and doesn't melt until 2800C, way above what jet fuel can do (steel beam anyone?). Some fission products would be included in the cloud.

Local decontamination effort would be many orders of magnitude below that of Chernobyl (where health effects on cleanup workers proved impossible to measure) and probably on par with 9/11 cleanup.

Re: Aircraft impacts https://s3.amazonaws.com/nasathermalimages/public/video/pret...

According to one article newly built nuclear reactor in Belarus can withstand crash of an aircraft up to 5700 kg with speed up to 100 m/s. That's modern design, older designs probably are worse. Air liner is two orders heavier.

Honestly withstanding airliner crash sounds like an impossible task. And crashing airliner into something is perfectly achievable by a terrorist or crazy pilot.

So I think that's a real danger.

They tested for that:

https://interestingengineering.com/crashed-jet-nuclear-react...

please read carefully: surface storage, i.e. the dry storage casks outside of the reactor. A reactor contains less nuclear material than the dry storage casks which contain decennia worth of nuclear waste.

The surface storage isn't at temperature, though. Waste is cooled off in a pool of water until it's cooled, before it's placed in dry storage.

Sure, rupturing that would release toxic materials out into the surrounding area. But how is that different from flying a plane into a chemical plant? If terrorists hijacked a plane, it'd probably kill an order of magnitude more people by flying it into a skyscraper than into dry waste caskets.

who cares about the surface storage temperature? a dirty bomb can deny access to surrounding areas for prolonged times.

theres so many potential failure points, here is another: if they fly through the electric pylons and into the cooling tower, there is no place to dump the energy as the reactor can't be shut down immediately, and cooling will fail soon, ...

> who cares about the surface storage temperature? a dirty bomb can deny access to surrounding areas for prolonged times.

A dirty bomb is a device specifically designed to disperse radioactive material. Spent nuclear fuels is actually much less harmful than the isotopes that could be used in a dirty bomb, and it's potential for dispersal is much less in a ground collision than in an atmospheric detonation. Nuclear waste would get dispersed over a few hundred meters, and the top couple feet of dirt in these areas would be cleared away and replaced.

> theres so many potential failure points, here is another: if they fly through the electric pylons and into the cooling tower, there is no place to dump the energy as the reactor can't be shut down immediately, and cooling will fail soon, ...

Which is why most plants have more than one cooling tower (well, some don't have any cooling towers if they're cooled by ocean water). And even in the event that all cooling facilities are destroyed, plant operators would insert the cooling rods to shut down the reactors. There are backup diesel generators to power the control systems in the event that the plant's main electric generator fails.

These kinds of scenarios are borderline absurd. By, the way, what happens if someone flies a plane into a chemical plant manufacturing solar panels? Harmful chemicals could be released into the surrounding areas. Should we shut down solar plant manufacturing until this failure point is addressed? Of course not, such a complaint is as nonsensical about the ones you're trying to make towards nuclear.

A terrorist is not likely to select a solar manufacturing plant as a target.

What chemicals would you be talking about? silane gas is explosive, but burns to water and silicon dioxide...

> These kinds of scenarios are borderline absurd

So absurd, the US government gave the hijackers of Southern Airways Flight 49 $2 million ..., about as absurd as an earthquake and a tsunami flooding some emergency generators...

Good luck with Mohr's circle...

> A terrorist is not likely to select a solar manufacturing plant as a target.

A terrorist is not likely to select a nuclear power plant's dry storage either. Again, a terrorist stands to kill far more people crashing a plane into a building than either dry cask storage or solar panel manufacturing planet.

> What chemicals would you be talking about? silane gas is explosive, but burns to water and silicon dioxide

Crashing a plane into inert concrete casks is too great a risk but crashing into a plant with explosives is fine? And depending on the type of solar panel being crated, manufacturing could involve cadmium and other materials that could easily pose a cancer risk on par with the uranium in the dry storage casks. And I doubt these materials are as well secured.

> So absurd, the US government gave the hijackers of Southern Airways Flight 49 $2 million

The plane itself is more expensive than the $2M. I doubt the authorities' decisions would have been different if the hijackers threatened to fly into the nearest skyscraper. And by the way, the hijackers threatened to crash into the reactor not the dry storage casks.

> about as absurd as an earthquake and a tsunami flooding some emergency generators

Earthquakes are real concerns, planes flying into dry storage casks are not. There's no Mohr's circle here, only increasingly bizarre scenarios about how someone might compromise dry storage casks (coupled with handwaving away the fact that there are far more dangerous things a person could do with a hijacked plane, like fly it into an occupied building).

> Again, a terrorist stands to kill far more people crashing a plane into a building than either dry cask storage or solar panel manufacturing planet.

For terrorists, body count isn't the goal it's one means to an ends indicated by the label.

Sure, a terrorist's goal is to create terror. But a higher body count is by far the most reliable way to generate more terror. Sure, a few people killed in a particularly gruesome way might create more terror than a numerically larger event. But only by a moderate factor. I highly doubt 10 people killed by a plane crashing into a dry storage site would leave a greater impression than a hundred killed by crashing into an occupied building. And a 10:1 ratio is probably generous towards the number killed by the attack on the waste storage. For the most part, these concrete cylinders sit still with few, if any, people around them: https://blogs-images.forbes.com/jamesconca/files/2018/03/ENW...

is cadmium still even used for new solar panels?

This thread is a quintessential anti-nuclear circular argument. Sorry for bad paraphrasing, but basically:

A: Nuclear is dangerous because bad things happen if a jumbo jet crashes onto it.

B: Is there anything that doesn't cause bad things when a jumbo jet crashes onto it?

A: Irrelevant, these things aren't as dangerous as nuclear.

I get that there are issues with nuclear. This isn't one.

did you read my comment about Southern Airways Flight 49?

its not just about things being bad when an airliner crashes, but about the additional risk incurred.

if I can choose between a nuclear power plant getting hit 10km from me, or some silane also 10km from me, I'd know what I'd dissaprove of most.

if I can choose between leaving for the next generations a location where surface storage was hit by an airliner, or where some silane gas was used being hit by an airliner, I'd know what I prefer to leave behind for them...

chemicals are easier to sort than isotopes

Nuclear waste sits in sealed concrete containers, and is stored by burying it in bedrock with no aquifer. There's so little of it that we can store it securely. Solar panels on the other hand... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1....

Nuclear waste is measured in the tens of thousands of tons. Solar waste is in the tens of millions of tons. Most of it just dumped in landfills.

If your concern is about wanting to minimize the amount of waste left to future generations, then there is absolutely no reason to choose solar over nuclear power. The energy density of nuclear power is such that it generates orders of magnitude less waste.

From the abstract:

> End-of-life (EOL) solar panels may become a source of hazardous waste although there are enormous benefits globally from the growth in solar power generation.

It is good that people worry about this new waste stream, and argue incentivizing recycling of this waste stream.

That said, the harmfulness of different types of waste is not compared in kilograms...

> That said, the harmfulness of different types of waste is not compared in kilograms...

Absolutely, the harm from solar panels dumped in landfills is vastly greater than uranium buried 300 meters deep in bedrock. Uranium's energy density is such that we can afford to spend money on tightly securing the little waste it produces. By comparison, most plans for renewable power generation involve covering 2-4% of the Earth's land in solar panels. This is a vast amount of waste to dispose of, and it's not remotely close to feasible to secure it like nuclear waste.

why the downvote?

I know of 0 incidents where terrorists did or threatened to attack a solar manufacturing plant with an aeroplane.

But we know of at least 1 incident of terrorists threatening to attack a nuclear facility with an aeroplane.

In fact, the failures at Fukushima were definitely human caused although it was indeed an extreme natural disaster as well.

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.

Much of what I've read about Fukushima still implicates "human bullshit", with regard to the reactor design, underestimating the maximum tsunami size that should be accounted for, and the physical layout of the facility (particularly the location of the backup generators).

Soviets were corrupt, Japanese were [not familiar with the explanation]. What would be the excuse for the next disaster? What if there are no selfless heroes around next time?

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.

Fukushima and Czernobyl are reactor types that lack the features to fail gracefully. If you want to see an accident in a reactor that does, read about TMI. Newer reactors like EPRs are even more graceful when failing.

And what would be the excuse when the new reactors fail disastrously? None of the failed ones were considered dangerous before they fail, they were all supposed to be impossible to cause a disaster due to redundancies, passive and active safety mechanisms. They were all supposed to be built perfectly and the people who operate them were supposed to know what they are doing.

Yet, we have Chernobyl and Fukushima.

What happens when the next time 20 million people need to be evacuated? Europe fell to it's knees when 1 million refugees moved, Americans choose their president on premise to build a wall to stop Mexicans.

The risk is simply too great just to have a neat machine running that produces the same stuff that can be produced with other machines.

The failed ones were known to be dangerous. Mostly that big problem was kept under radar of the public, oversight failed big time or was complicit. The other big problem is, we keep running old rustbuckets and dubious designs. More than half of the worlds reactors should probably be shut down immediately, and most of the rest is also due for a replacement very very soon.

How do we know that this time is different?

See, the thing that goes wrong doesn’t have to be even a technological one. Fission is a process that spontaneously can go wrong unless harnessed by systems that are built by thousands of people. Anything can go wrong and anyone can screw up. All can happen and the same time as demonstrated by the previous disasters.

You say that the current reactors are very dangerous and should be closed down. Please give me a material by the plant builders and operators that communicates these dangers with the people that might get exposed to a failure.

Fission can spontaneously go wrong in the same way all the protons in your body could just decide to decay. A reactor is not magic, just physics.

Your narrative sounds like you're claiming that we didn't learn from Chernobyl and that Fukushima is proof of that. That's not true, no one is going around claiming that ancient designs are somehow becoming safer and safer. Fukushima was constructed literally before Chernobyl was. Back then generation II reactors took an active approach to safety. Operators might have to take action and power to the plant needed to be always available in order to safely manage some faults. They took the approach of "lets get five redundant diesel generators and have triple redundant control cabling, sensors, and valves" whereas newer Generation IV reactors are passively safe when things go wrong. Even on the AP1000 which was approved by the NRC back in 2005 is passively safe even in a plantwide blackout with a gravity based evaporative cooling system that can last 72 hours before needing an additional source of water to fill it back up. Around 72 hours after shutdown the decay heat should be able to boil a little over a gallon per second of 30C water. All things considered it's pretty trivial to get a gallon per second of water to the reactor within 3 days time. The new SMR from NuScale that just got approved is even better given that the pool the reactor sits in is sized large enough that by the time the water in the pool is gone it'll have reduced to the point where it's cold enough to just air cool the reactor so it's passively safe indefinitely.

Even in the case of Fukushima, I'd like to point out that all things considered, zero people died from acute radiation poisoning and IIRC only one case of lung cancer was likely attributed to exposure from Fukushima. Fukushima was basically a worst case scenario for any Gen II reactor. The only reason Chernobyl was so much worse was because of the incredibly unsafe design out of the USSR. They didn't care, they didn't bother with a containment building at all, had operators blindly following orders from management even more incompetent than the operators were, operated the reactor way outside of the limits that were placed on the reactor by removing all the control rods which was never supposed to be done, etc. You can pin Fukushima on the Nuclear industry, Chernobyl was solely because of the callous indifference and incompetence of the USSR.

>"And what would be the excuse when the new reactors fail disastrously? "

CANDU reactors are failsafe and have been for 50 years. Fukushima or Chernobyl style disaster in phisically impossible with their heavy-water, unpressurised design.

Even Fukushima was a human problem, they had the warnings, the designs, the technology, the reviews, and the equipment to prevent a meltdown. But newer safety features were never implemented due to political problems and concerns. They knew Tsunamis bigger than the plant was designed for could happen, they knew earthquakes bigger than the plant could handle could happen, they had the technology and knowledge to reduce or eliminate those problems so it wouldn't melt down, they just didn't bother doing any of the work to accomplish it.

And there is no reason to think anybody else would bother, either.

> Nuclear is the future and there is no debate about it - energy density of the fuel is unmatched.

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

Fukushima was largely a human bullshit problem too.

as was the previous reactor disaster; as will be the next one.

I read somewhere that Fukushima's natural disaster wad a "once in 50-years event" which is like saying it's not your fault if you run a particular stop sign every day for 20 years because "the was only a 1% chance of someone coming the other way"

They could have stopped running the stop sign at any point because they knew it was a problem for decades. They just decided it was too inconvenient to stop despite the constant protests of the passengers.

What I think? I think for countries like Elbonia you can say 'here are your solar panels and batteries, have a nice day'. Can't do that with a nuke plant.

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

(side note: There are portable, assembled small nuclear reactors you can install in remote areas in months time and serve the needs of a small enterprise.)

You have a good point. If you're a small country, like the size of Luxembourg, it doesn't make sense to open a nuclear power plant - you can import and/or go the renewable route.

For industrial powerhouses and large civilizations? Different story.

It' because we can't see it. It's also unknown to most what reactors actually do. They're basically steam reactors.

Nuclear is the future indeed, the fusion reactor in the sky supplies all the energy we’ll ever need.

Problem with that is you only get a fraction of that output, more precisely, it diminishes with the power of 2 for every unit of distance between here and there.

Wouldn't it be great if humanity put its mind and effort into reliably recreating it right here in our own backyard? It's not easy, it's a process, sacrifices (most of which needless and avoidable) have been made... but in the long run, it will net us immeasurably much more than spraying the planet with large fans and solar panels.

Future humans will definitely use it, but it is too ahead of its time. You need a baseline level of average intelligence in the world for it to be widely adopted, we still have a few generations to go.

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