How Many People Did Nuclear Energy Kill? [video] | Hacker News Reader

How Many People Did Nuclear Energy Kill? [video]

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36 pointsthrow0101a25 comments

I think most environmentalist are just very anti-growth and just want to solve environmental issues by reducing any resource consumption. By saying no to nuclear they are fulfilling their anti-growth strategy, but leaving a large resource gap that gets filled by more polluting, less dramatic energy sources.

So close. The only acceptable solution to them is less consumption. They don't really think through the consequences.

For example, they have cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline, but simply do not think about the additional fossil fuel that will be burned transporting that oil via train instead. They dream of less consumption and ignore the actual real world consequences.

No, the point is that shipping by train is more expensive. The point is to drive up the price of oil and hasten the time when it becomes uncompetitive with renewables.

That's a good point. But is it better to raise taxes on fossil fuel, or decide to ship oil via train instead of pipeline? I'm not sure what the exact tradeoff would be if train delivered oil was a little more expensive. A little more expensive would lead to a little less usage while the delilvery would pump more pollution into the air. The math might work out out your way or my way.

If I could snap my fingers, I would raise the tax on oil dramatically, and ship oil via pipeline until renewables actually take over and the demand for fossil fuel actually goes down. It seems to me that it would be better for the environment than other alternatives.

I agree this is optimal, however politics is a thing and you went and used the word tax.

If I could snap my fingers I would just copy the strategy by the anti-nuclear movement. As an strategy, theirs were both a great success, market friendly, easy for politicians to support and economical.

First step is to forbid creating new fossil fueled power plants for increased capacity. This has zero impact right now on the grid, but sets the road for the industry. Projects created before this date is not impacted.

Second step is to set a deadline where existing plants need to be demolished. The date get set around the time of existing plans for investments to be recovered. This makes current investors happy, while we also get a definitive date where the plants will be gone.

At this point we are done. New investors will look at the market and see an opportunity for increase demand for energy down the road, and at the same time see old capacity that will need to be replaced. There is no tax nor tax politics involved. No decisions regarding pipelines, trains or ships. Just two political decisions that has zero impact on anyone right now.

I think the real reason goes farther back. The environmentalist movement grew out of the peace movement, which was anti-nuclear because all they saw were the military applications. A few decades down the line, they've forgotten why they don't like it, but they still don't like it.

Less than coal, oil and even hydropower per KW.h.

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

Even after making absolute worst case assumptions (linear no threshold), which are still widely debated (see the book ‘Radiation and reason’ by Wade Allison, my old professor, if you are sufficiently interested).

But does that scale? Planes kill fewer people than cars do per mile traveled. What happens when everyone has a flying car?

Yes...? We would still be talking about highly regulated centralized power generation. We're not talking about everyone having a nuclear reactor in their backyard.

I thought small modular reactors were the new hotness in this space.

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

That's a bad analogy. France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear and it scales perfectly fine. It's not like everyone will have his own personal nuclear reactor in their living room

The argument against nuclear is no longer environmental, it's cost. For the price of a kWh of nuclear (20cents), you can get 3 kWh of solar (3x1.5), 2 kWh of wind (2x3) and 1 kWh of geothermal (7.5cents), with a few cents left over to upgrade your power lines. And you can get it in a year, rather than in a couple of decades.

It's cost, BECAUSE environmentalists have slowed down innovation through fear-mongering.. If it was any other industries it would be cheaper.

You're probably right, but so what? You can rail against past injustice but nothing you can do will make nuclear power a rational choice in 2021 or beyond. Solar power is cheaper than just the steam turbine in a nuclear plant.

Investing in it now would make it cheaper on the long term

Not to mention that nuclear was used for doing a few very obscene and terrible things that will rank easily among the worst crimes against humanity.

If investors suddenly don't want to be linked with your product in any way... well, maybe your product sucks. Burning thousands of people alive isn't good for your brand image and PR.

Keep blaming other people for your own bad decisions instead to face the consequences of your acts is what children do. Lets behave as adults.

this is like saying gasoline is bad because napalm.

> this is like saying gasoline is bad because napalm.

A closer metaphor could be trying to build a new market selling napalm as toy cleaner, and blaming housewives for blocking the development of the product.

A product that was proven difficult to store, prone to catch fire, staining the wood for three generations and more expensive than the other brands.

Measuring intermittent sources by raw price per watt hour is misleading. How much does solar cost at night? Or wind energy on windless days? A lot more because it needs to be stored and retrieved.

Shaving 10-20% off fossil fuels with intermittent sources is easy. Actually decarbonizing the energy sector with intermittent sources is much more difficult, since demand and supply do not match up.

Contrast Germany and France. The champions of intermittent sources and nuclear energy respectively, and take a look at the CO2 per KWh: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-i...

so let's figure out how to reduce the cost. no doubt it's far more expensive than necessary.

solar and wind are great, but they don't run 24/7, need a battery storage solution, and take up a huge amount of land compared to nuclear.

The video goes through this in great details. When we close down nuclear energy plants we know from history what those replacement power plants are. They are fossil fueled energy plants, mostly coal and oil.

If a country can shutdown nuclear plants without adding more coal, oil and natural gas power plants to the grid then more credit to that country. If they can use that cheap solar and wind without a fossil fuel plants then that is what the market should do, but until that is the practical result of dismantling nuclear power plants then we should not continue the practice of replacing nuclear power plants with coal and oil. If that cost more money then it will have to cost more.

The single simplest solutions to all this debate over renewable costs is to simply impose a law which say nothing about nuclear or renewables. A simple law that forbids the construction of new fossil fuel power plants or the expansion of new capacity by existing fossil fuel power plants. What about the cost of nuclear? What about the cheaper price of renewable? We don't need the law to mention either. That should be up to the market to decide, because if we forbid the construction of fossil fuel power plants then the ever increasing demand for more energy will trigger market forces to build something, either nuclear or renewable.

I am not a nuclear advocate. I simply do not want more coal, oil and natural gas being burned when in the past my country (Sweden) has been pretty good at avoiding burning fossil fuels. When they recently turned of a reaction, a backup oil power plants suddenly found itself commercial viable to run all year round rather than just during the cold winters. I do not want oil in my air, I do not care if oil is cheaper, and I do not want Sweden to go down the path that Germany has with its replacement of nuclear in favor of more fossil fuel plants. There need to be a law, preferable internationally, which say that you can not replace non-nuclear energy capacity with fossil fueled energy capacity.

Possible counter argument: nuclear runs 24/7.

In the US, data over several years has shown wind available only one-third of the time, and solar available one-quarter:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Capacity_facto...

Nuclear is 90% of the time.

From your article "geothermal resources are generally available all the time"

My costs were quoted in kWh, not kW. So that already adjusts for capacity factor. So my comment has 7x the number of kWh of a nuclear solution, but it has 19x (!) the nominal generating capacity.

Also remember that part of the reason for the low capacity factor of renewables is over-production, not just under-production. During high wind events, some turbines are feathered because there isn't enough load on the grid to use the energy.

Battery storage is cheap. Casey Handmer calculated that it's cheaper to use batteries to store energy locally than it is to build high voltage lines: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...

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