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Comment by legulere | Hacker News Reader

> Whether or not nuclear power costs too much will ultimately be a matter for markets to decide

It’s not a market decision, but a government decision, as nuclear power has always been built with state guarantees and/or subsidies.

This article also again equates safety with lack of deaths. That’s like saying a neighborhood is safe, because in the robberies there only a few people die. Chernobyl and Fukushima had dramatic effects on millions of people. Contamination from Chernobyl to this day is a problem in Germany for instance.

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We're comparing two neighbourhoods. One has less deaths and less robberies. It is the one with nuclear power.

Chernobyl has done less damage and had less impact on those millions of people than the totally routine burning of coal. I grew up in a coal mining region; I fully expect more people suffer negative health outcomes when coal works as expected than in a Class 7 nuclear catastrophe. We just don't count the health impacts properly because it is too hard to prove cause and effect.

The overwhelming safety of the nuclear process makes the failures look bad, because we aren't used to nuclear plants producing detectable levels of ambient pollution.

> We just don't count the health impacts properly because it is too hard to prove cause and effect.

This also goes for nuclear.

The "too hard to prove cause" is for attributing individual cases. In any particularly case - just like with the link of smoking and lung cancer - it is impossible to say if lung problems were caused by coal plants.

Statistical estimates of the amounts of deaths and lung problems coal power plants cause, however, can be much more accurate. And they bespeak hundreds of thousands gruesome deaths from coal every year.

Accidents are bad but left-overs are even worse. I wish people would think more about long-term problems with spent fuel rods. I don't think that burying them is a viable solution as the Asse mine in Germany shows.

https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-waste-in-disused-german-mine-l...

The salt mine was deemed to be safe for thousands of years. But then people discovered ingress of water. And salt water is corrosive.

I am sure that we will experience very expensive disasters with nuclear storage the next few thousand years.

We should never have used nuclear power in large scale.

Edit: And we should shut down coal, too. It's not about nuclear vs coal but nuclear vs renewables.

but, if coal burning continues to pump out carbon dioxide into our atmosphere and eventually completely upend any semblance of stable environment... wouldn’t it be preferred to make not doing that a priority?

It's not about nuclear vs coal but about nuclear vs renewables.

Just shut down both coal and nuclear!

And what happens when there's a storm? Renewables alone can't provide all the power needed over extended periods of time without very significant storage, for which there is no large scale cost effective solution actually implemented.

Nuclear power also shuts down when there's significant disruption from nature. Nuclear power even might do something even worse than shutting down.

It took a tsunami on an unmaintained nuclear power plant to cause Fukushima.

It took the russians lifting off _every single security mechanism_ to cause Chernobyl.

The ojer major incidents like Three Mile Island are just "well, security measures have failed, we didn't have enough fallbacks. It's broken now. Light irradiation around but nothing major".

So, no, nuclear power doesn't stop for anything but the absolute worst conditions. As for the "doing even worse" part, two can play that game: hydro is renewable and yet killed hundreds of thousands. Oh no, stop hydro!

The problem are the future accidents with the left-overs of nuclear. They are simply uncountable because these are in the future.

Advanced radio chemistry will produce meta-materials which will enable time travel. Problem solved! Wheeee!

All the nuclear waste the US has ever produced fits in a football field at a height of around 30 feet.

The Asse is a people problem, caused by incompetence. Look who is responsible for it, if you like to ;)

Furthermore, to my knowledge there is no higly radioactive stuff stored down there, just some recklessly offloaded cans with cleaning clothes, and such. Again, incompetence and recklessness.

As of now, anything highly radioactive is stored above ground in 'Castor' either under clear skies, or light halls there, or as 'Zwischenlager' on the grounds of NPPs, maybe sometimes exported to make it a problem of other people, as usual...

Anyways, we could possibly transmutate it, like it is researched in Mol, Belgium, 'burn' its full potential in liquid-salt reactors, whatever. This whole longterm storage concept is shizophrenic thinking, because we didn't really research nuclear further, after we had working reactors based on (upscaled)military applications for economic, political, whatever reasons.

I am sure that we will experience very expensive disasters with renewable energy in the next few dozen years.

edit: Another thing regarding long term storage in 'geologic times'. If some group in 100.000 years. or later comes across this, and doesn't know how to handle it, why should I care about those stupid morons?

For all I care they discovered the curse of the atomic pharaos, and deserve it! Degraded bitches!

F-U-C-K-I-N-G-D-E-A-L-W-I-T-H-I-T!

The WHO estimates that 4,200,000 people die every year from ambient air pollution. That’s one death every 7.5 seconds. That’s one Chernobyl death toll every 18 to 125 hours (depending on which estimate you’re looking at).

The argument about land being uninhabitable is equally silly, because land permanently submerged in the ocean tends to be uninhabitable as well.

The perception of the risks associated with nuclear is so dramatically misaligned with reality. The only conclusion I can possibly draw is that anybody who is anti-nuclear can’t possibly be taking climate change seriously.

I’m not saying that nuclear is worse than coal (I don’t think so), but only that there are negative effects beyond death and that we should take them into account.

The things we compare are nuclear and renewables. The consensus is already pretty clear that coal is on its way out. Which I think we all can agree on is a good thing.

I think you're mistaking Fukushima for the tsunami that caused the incident at the nuclear plant.

Let's not forget the sheer magnitude of the earthquake/tsunami: most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, tsunami waves up to 40.5 meters

This fact sheet [1] from UNSCEAR (united nations agency) shows the impact of the nuclear incident itself:

* Cancer rates to remain stable

* Theoretical increased risk of thyroid cancers among most exposed children

* No impact on birth

* No discernible increase in cancer rates for workers

* Temporary impact on wildlife

It's a short fact sheet so I encourage you to read it completely

In comparison, the tsunami itself [2] killed over 15,000 people and still 200,000+ live away from their home

[1] https://www.unscear.org/docs/publications/2016/factsheet_en_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

It might have been the biggest tsunami ever recorded, but it's nothing new that tsunamis do occur in Japan, and still the plant was allowed to be built and operated directly at the seaside at a height of only 10 meters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...). And why? Because the nuclear lobby had a lot of influence in Japan.

I'm not sure where you get the 200,000 evacuated people from, but the only mention of 200,000 people being evacuated in the article you are quoting is in fact in the "Nuclear power plants" section...

> This article also again equates safety with lack of deaths. That’s like saying a neighborhood is safe, because in the robberies there only a few people die.

The 1952 Great Smog of London [0] caused 4000 deaths due to coal burning over FIVE DAYS. Not quite like for like, but the Chernobyl Exclusion zone is about 1000 sq. miles, which is approximate the same size as (modern) London.

The UN predicts that possibly 4000 people may die from Chernobyl over a 50 YEAR period. [1]

> Chernobyl and Fukushima had dramatic effects on millions of people. Contamination from Chernobyl to this day is a problem in Germany for instance.

I'd like to see references for this.

Fossil fuel mining causes far more deaths than nuclear. Fossil fuel burning causes even more deaths from respitory diseases.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London 1. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...

"As a result of the Chernobyl reactor accident, certain species of mushrooms and wild game are still highly contaminated with caesium-137 in some areas of Germany." https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush..., from the Federal Office for Radiation Protection.

Ultimately it says this:

> If wild game or wild growing mushrooms are consumed in usual amounts, the additional radiation exposure is comparatively low but it can be avoided. Those who wish to reduce their personal exposure should not eat wild game self-hunted or mushrooms self-picked in the most affected areas of Germany.

and

> In Germany it is not permitted to market food with a radiocaesium content of more than 600 becquerel per kilogram.

and

> In the last years values of up to several thousand becquerel per kilogram were measured in wild game and certain edible mushrooms.

So isn't this is just cautionary, rather than a significant health risk?

It's mostly cautionary but a problem for forest management because it means that the radioactivity of game has to be checked and it often can't be sold. I've eaten the mushrooms in question (self-picked) and would do it again. They're delicious. But my region also wasn't particularly hard-hit by the Chernobyl fallout.

Yes, there were a lot of deaths from these nuclear disasters, they were horrible, we should have avoided them. But nuclear energy is still much less deadly than fossil fuels. Air pollution-caused diseases are lung cancer and stroke for example. I think nuclear plants have become much safer and there is more international regulation to maintain their safety. I recommend this excellent video on this topic from Kurzgesagt: https://youtu.be/Jzfpyo-q-RM

Not only is nuclear safer than coal, it's safer than solar! (in terms of deaths per Gwh produced)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

One of the points of the toplevel comment is exactly

> This article also again equates safety with lack of deaths.

So adding a statistic that only focuses on that seems not helpful to me. Are there some available that give a broader analysis (that might not be as catchy for social media)?

What other metric would you use though? It seems to me the top-level comment is arguing "I think nuclear is scary so therefore statistical risk analysis is invalid"

I disagree.

Impact on eco systems and economy, injuries, and maybe other effects that are not easily compressed into a single number. I don't disagree that Deaths/GWh is one of the most important statistics on the safety of energy production. But while we often quantify safety of roads/vehicles by deaths/billion length units driven, one assumption is it is highly correlated to other safety indicators such as injuries. Coal will probably be even worse considering these statistics and nuclear will probably still fare well.

One example I am aware of: Germany still monitors contamination of mushrooms and other wildlife in bavarian soil [1]

[1] http://doris.bfs.de/jspui/bitstream/urn:nbn:de:0221-20191007...

Chernobyl and Fukushima are not the best arguments against nuclear imo.

Chernobyl was underbudgetted in terms of safety. For instance no protective dome was places around the reactor housing as done in other countries. Add that to a suboptimal design to start with and sheer bad luck...

Fukushima on the other hand is a better comparison. But on larger scales, such as Europe or the US, surely it must be possible to place the plants in areas that are not subject to such natural disasters that would threaten the safety of the reactors?

> hernobyl was underbudgetted in terms of safety.

I think that is something we should expect to be the default and is a problem in maintenance as well. Leaky pipes and more are common problems for nuclear power plants. e.g. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/radioactive-leaks-found-at-75-o...

> Fukushima on the other hand is a better comparison. But on larger scales, such as Europe or the US, surely it must be possible to place the plants in areas that are not subject to such natural disasters that would threaten the safety of the reactors?

In the end it matters to massively overscale the safety for the location it is in, no matter where you put it. Including rigurous maintenance and checks of all of this. But those things will make it much more expensive.

The article you reference is a bit of a scare job, and you're conflating here on-site storage facilities with the actual operating reactor. Note that levels of tritium do not exceed limits in drinking water.

Because of nuclear physics (gamma energy levels, isotope half-life), it's very easy to identify when any contamination, even amounts that have no effect on human health, escape from a nuclear plant. Meanwhile, fossil fuel emissions (not just carbon-- soot and other particulates cause near-term health problems for humans) continue.

You still have to remember that the Fukushima reactors were also old and crappy designs. That TMI was as harmless as it was came from the things we learned, Fukushima predates that. Tepco also refused to upgrade or improve several safety measures.

And the Czernobyl design not only ignored a lot of safety knowledge the Sowjets had at that time, but took intentional shortcuts to be cheaper and make the fuel more accessible (supposedly for bomb production).

> You still have to remember that the Fukushima reactors were also old and crappy designs.

This is only comforting if we stopped operating "old and crappy" reactors. But overall, your comment seems to agree with my point, as you wrote:

> Tepco also refused to upgrade or improve several safety measures.

> ignored a lot of safety knowledge the Sowjets had at that time, but took intentional shortcuts to be cheaper and make the fuel more accessible

This the point I tried(, but not neccesarily succeded) to make: We should expect this kind of corner cutting and underfunding.

Yes, I agree completely. Nuclear can be safe and sensible, but we do need to get rid of a bunch of old crap first.

> surely it must be possible to place the plants in areas that are not subject to such natural disasters that would threaten the safety of the reactors?

Reactors need lots of water for cooling, so they're regularly placed at rivers. Rivers flood during melting season and storms. Storms also interrupt the grid occasionally. Due to climate change, these events are getting more common.

As a result, anywhere you can place reactors, you'll have to deal with situations where you have no grid connection, no backup power, no generators, and flooding, at unexpected times.

A nuclear reactor needs always, 24/7, forever power due to cooling. This isn't really compatible.

One point the article could have made but curiously didn't is that even in the case of a catastrophic aftermath like Chernobyl or Fukushima the end result is primarily human moving away from the zone because of cancer risk and nature claiming back control of the exclusion zone.

So at one point maybe we should start considering that nuclear is mostly dangerous to human society. As human society is responsible for climate change maybe that is some form of karma. Should nuclear be part of the solution this is the risk we might need to take because we will be the most impacted by consequences.

Life, Uh, Finds a Way...

Radiation doesn’t only affect humans

Yes but the deep question is the following:

Being an animal would you rather unknowingly have you lifespan reduced by an invisible force or being killed by humans or the artificial infrastructures they build by grinding more and more natural space each year?

Unfortunately animals can't advocate for themselves so we'll have to try figure out the best answer.

And yet the exclusion zone around Chernobyl has biodiversity higher than anywhere else in Europe.

So even if nuclear power is as bad as hippies say it's still better for the environment than human civilization.

You don't need to blow a nuclear reactor for improve biodiversity, just make the place a natural park.

I admit that it's not so spectacular, but it works too, and I suspect it's cheaper.

It seems that this is debatable, as a simple google search turns up completely opposite conclusions, such as this: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-10819027

Why not cite an actual paper instead of an interview with someone who 'feels their duty' is to tell us about the dangers of nuclear accidents?

>In contrast, our long-term empirical data showed no evidence of a negative influence of radiation on mammal abundance. Relative abundances of elk, roe deer, red deer and wild boar within the Chernobyl exclusion zone are similar to those in four (uncontaminated) nature reserves in the region and wolf abundance is more than 7 times higher. Additionally, our earlier helicopter survey data show rising trends in elk, roe deer and wild boar abundances from one to ten years post-accident. These results demonstrate for the first time that, regardless of potential radiation effects on individual animals, the Chernobyl exclusion zone supports an abundant mammal community after nearly three decades of chronic radiation exposures.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...

> Chernobyl and Fukushima had dramatic effects on millions of people.

Chernobyl yes. Fukushima, you are stretching things a bit. Unless you are talking about mass hysteria related to Nuclear Power.

> It’s not a market decision, but a government decision

Yes, the government must include CO2 tax into the price making nuclear much more viable.

> That’s like saying a neighborhood is safe, because in the robberies there only a few people die.

So you prefer to kill the whole neighborhood and claim that it’s safe, because there are no robbers anymore.

> It’s not a market decision, but a government decision, as nuclear power has always been built with state guarantees and/or subsidies.

No energy source can survive without government subsidies at the moment, one way or another.

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