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Comment by misiti3780 | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear energy is safer than coal, oil, natural gas.

https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106843635-161400902674...

If this were true, fission plants would be insurable in the private market. Lives lost is not the only measure of safety. Or to put it another way, if something is safe, it does not have an uninsurable liability attached to it.

All kinds of big risky endeavors are insurable. Oil rigs are insured. Other power plants are insured.

Accident liability is not the only liability: Nuclear power plants uniformly cost a multiple of their estimated decommissioning costs. This leads to pressure to keep old plants running, just to put off that particular day of reckoning. And then there is a cost of waste storage.

When there is a normal market for nuclear power, like there is for a gas turbine plant, privately insured, with future costs bonded, then let's build some nukes.

I am optimistic it will happen, but not based on current technology. Nuclear power startups are a very good thing in part because relying on the old liability shifting approach probably will not fly. These have to have really sustainable TCO.

You can't really measure safety in terms of deaths. Chernobyl only officially killed a handful of people, yet rendered a huge chunk of land uninhabitable. When nuclear goes wrong, it goes really wrong.

And yes, you can argue that that Chernobyl was an old reactor design, Fukushima was complacency, but the reality is that technology always goes wrong. I'd rather have technology that catches fire (wind turbines) than technology that gives people cancer and forces entire cities to migrate (reactors) when it goes wrong.

What if your preferred solution doesnt curtail the raise in temperatures fast enough and renders large parts of earth inhabitable for future generations?

there is no perfect solution, i understand the risk associated with nuclear power but i think the smartest minds thinking deeply about the climate space all basically agree that there is no solution to fighting climate change that doesnt include nuclear. we should be sinking lots of money into reducing the risks and coming up with innovative ways to make it ubiquitous

We are already past that point. The world is not reducing carbon emissions fast enough. I don't see how nuclear allows us to reduce them any faster. The bottleneck is funding and will of the everyday man.

The world won't become uninhabitable - global warming alone is not going to cook us. What will happen is more natural disasters, difficulty with natural resources and farming, and wars for those resources.

Climate engineering is the best hope to reduce global warming. Aerosols sprayed into the atmosphere, that sort of thing.

There is still hope, but we sure do need a global mindset shift when it comes to nuclear (and many other topics for sure).

Global warming will make parts of the worlds inhabitable. Sea levels will rise, so much heat and humidity in some places that your body won't be able to regulate its internal temperature...

Besides the fact that people who argue against nuclear are not pro fossil energy, I'm always astonished to see nuclear fans argue with dead people only. As if having to evacuate cities and regions could be ignored and accepted as some kind of "safe".

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Since the fans of the atom downvote everything not in their frame of reality, I'm now unable to answer anymore so I'll just edit my answer to this comment:

@yongjik: I can't drink enough to follow this argument twisting. Nothing you said makes my argument go away. Those things ARE dangerous. Neither fossil fuel nor cars won't make the risk go away or be hidden in a cloud of mad word twisting.

Also: nobody who makes an argument against nuclear, makes one for fossil fuel. They usually are pro renewable energy. But you know that don't you? You just wanted to derail....

@cestith: acutally MOST of the nuclear reactors did not became a catastrophe. It doesn't change anything about the fact that when it becomes one, it is one.

Show me a city evacuated because it was near a CANDU reactor. Light water plants are not the beginning and end of nuclear power.

If you prefer, we don't have to evacuate. We can just tell people to keep living in Fukushima and the number of deaths will be still smaller than fossil fuel plants.

People don't evacuate from fossil fuel, not because it's safer, but because you can't, so we just accepted it as facts of life. More people die from vehicle exhaust than Fukushima: where are you going to go?

And why are we comparing to fossil fuel plants as opposed to other renewable sources which are cheaper, safer, and less polluting than nuclear?

The problem for nuclear is that if you are making a pollution based safety argument for it, the obvious question is why not spend the money you would on nuclear in more cost effective and equally green or greener alternatives (ones which lack a doomsday scenario as a bonus).

In reality, nuclear sucks up a lot of green capital for 8-10 years at a minimum, under delivers, if it delivers at all, and does so at an extremely high price.

There are new nuclear technologies that have the potential to be cost competitive with other renewables, but they aren’t production ready yet. Why not make these arguments when those technologies are ready.

Unfortunately there is no solution on the near horizon for large scale grid storage of intermittent renewables. I would argue nuclear is our only choice. I made a comment here linking sources on the problems facing grid storage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348355

Fukushima evacuation was an idiotic knee-jerk that killed more people than the alternative of not doing it.

Yeah I'm sure you'd have been able to calm the people and tell them to stay around a nuclear reactor which might have become the next Tshernobyl while the earth was still shaking....you people are unbelievable sometimes.

That's a strange statistic. Saying it is safer by this statistic alone is misleading.

What other statistic would you use? Deaths per year? Injuries per year? Injuries per TWh? Without further information we can't have a conversation about what wouldn't be misleading (or whether this is misleading in the first place - I don't see why).

Total deaths over 1000 years after a catastrophic release of nuclear material, for example 10 fully-fueled power plants being hit by missiles during a conflict.

Also, probability of nuclear waste being unearthed in the next 50.000 years multiplied by the estimated death toll of such event.

I mean come on, deaths by pollution and accidents is all you look at to declare it as safe? What about the almost existential risk and the unsolved final repository problem? (the US at least still doesn't have one). Maybe the risk is low and until now nothing serious has happened in the US, but the potential for damage is so devastating that you should factor it in somehow. It's just not as simple as one number is probably what I'm trying to say ...

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