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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

Things like this make me wonder how cheap a truly commoditized nuclear industry could be. What kind of lifestyle are we giving up by requiring orders of magnitude fewer deaths-per-megawatt-hour of nuclear compared to fossil fuels? What if we were civilized enough you didn't have to worry about anyone building their own atom bomb?

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I think we need to be a spacefaring species to be able to fully utilize nuclear energy, and to be a spacefaring species, highly automated orbital manufacturing has to be established. Doing nuclear on the planet Earth at all is perhaps too akin to doing it in the middle of Manhattan island.

>What if we were civilized enough you didn't have to worry about anyone building their own atom bomb?

Then we'd be something other than human. You'd need a species that values all members equally and has no preference for those in the same social group (or family, etc.). Likely it also means members cannot value themselves above other members. Without all that "civilized" simply means that some group gets oppressed and isn't allowed to fight back in any way.

There is a lot of very complex, and very real human psychology and sociology at play in those decisions. A lot of it centers around who accrues the benefits of a given energy source, vs. who pays the consequences.

On the other hand, the consequences have already been paid. There are plenty of highly irradiated places on earth already that could be used for future nuclear projects.

As you are asking open ended questions. What do you think is an appropriate level of deaths per MWh? Can you put a number on it? And how do you engineer a reactor to accurately and repeatedly achieve a certain risk level?

Well, one answer to that is when the lives saved by nuclear balance out the lives cost by fossil fuels. Nuclear currently has a rate of 0.07 deaths per terawatt-hour. Coal has a rate of 24.6 deaths per terawatt-hour. If fully replacing coal with nuclear required making nuclear a hundred times more dangerous than it is now it would still be completely justified.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

So imagine a nuclear plant that saves costs by reducing safety margins. You have less redundancy in equipment and staff, less containment, or whatever. How do you accurately predict the risk? And what error would that risk have? Every single factor you are modifying can come together in weird combinations and has an error bar of its own. What happens when there is suicidal engineer + metal fatigue + unusual weather conditions? Ultimately this seems like a fools errand. The belt-and-braces approach is the only way humans have found to safely design complex inherently risky machines. And deviating from that creates Shuttle shaped clouds in the sky and Boeing shaped holes in the ground.

I think it be a lot like airliners vs small aircraft in terms of safety.

Much cheaper than solar and wind.

Not that much. Nuclear energy alone wouldn't really make a huge difference. Even if we ignore the obvious problems with safety (big issue with older designs and their spent fuel storage) and security (huge issue with modern designs) when nuclear power would be similarly widespread as, e.g., natural gas: There is still the fact that it is inherently a stationary power source (with not that many good places to put it). Distribution of electricity isn't a big problem, but it doesn't help for mobility applications, so we would need the battery or H2 industry anyways.

Factor in the wastly different levels of difficulty between solar and nuclear power, I'd think we would also have the latter, if just as a simple alternative when you don't have the time or the capital to setup a nuclear power plant. Wind energy might be a different matter, as it comes with a lot more practical difficulties.

One could simply compare France and Germany to understand how things would end up, I think.

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