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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty excited about these. It takes nuclear in a new direction. What disappoints me though is that of the people doing this research that I've contacted, none of them are reaching out to the "other side" (things you would pump the heat into) here. A packaged closed cycle steam turbine system for electricity generation, for example, would be an excellent add-on here.

The Navy has some great small turbine systems (although they typically use the ocean as a big thermal sink for their re condensers), and the folks who design geothermal plants could have a role here if they wanted, but so far not much work there that has appeared in the sources I tend to scan.

As a result I'm concerned that these things with hit the market with no "shovel ready" plans to put them into production, and the lag between that and when you can put them in production will kill the reactor developers. I have seen it in other industries and it hurts to watch it unfold.

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OTOH, power generation from industrial waste heat is an increasingly hot topic these days. Whether steam turbine or organic Rankine cycle, finding something compatible in the 1-10 MW scale should be quite straightforward.

I've just read through the comments, and can't really see anyone else making this point .. so I'm assuming it will be unpopular.

Why is nuclear the silver bullet that will save us?

Logically, renewable and storage on a microlevel seems to make more sense.

With nuclear .. no matter how advanced the tech is now, I can't see how we're not robbing Peter to pay back Paul.

The waste will be around for longer than we are. We have no solution other than 'lock it up'.

Accidents do — and most like will — happen. How will increasing the volume of reactors not increase this risk?

I think it's more akin to putting out a structure fire with water. You stop the immediate threat and save lives and some property.

And while some property damage will result because it's all getting soaked, it's still better to have something left than nothing, and while an un-burnable building would be nice, it doesn't exist yet.

Qualitatively, every choice is equal, because a qualitative argument can't distinguish between a big problem plus a small benefit and a big benefit plus a small problem. Quantitatively, you can make rational decisions. So, the answer to your questions are, "how much will building more reactors increase the accident risk," and "how much nuclear waste will be produced in the course of normal operation?"

This is a good point, 'how much’ is an important question.

But then, it seems society sometimes make the decision to take somethings off the table entirely.

I look at the accident at Fukushima, and earlier (when I was small child) Chernobyl and I can't help wondering whether some risks aren't worth taking when there are alternatives available.

I'm sure risk analysis was taken seriously in Japan. Often we miss things, and the people answering 'how much', quite frankly get it wrong.

> Why is nuclear the silver bullet that will save us?

I'm not sure many people make this argument. Although the people that do are very vocal. But they are wrong. The general consensus around nuclear is that it adds to the number of solutions we can use. Considering the inhomogeneous nature of climate and regions nuclear may have advantages in certain areas, whereas other areas it may be unnecessary. Anyone claiming "one size fits all" is just selling snake oil. Essentially the argument comes down to "why time one hand behind your back when trying to solve an extremely important and challenging problem?"

As for waste, it isn't as big of a deal as you might think. Though this is more difficult to understand without an expertise in the subject matter. Mostly this is due to the complexity of understanding the different types of waste, amounts, and the vastly different levels of radiation in those waste products. Most of these conversations are akin to people talking about rocket science without knowing Newtonian mechanics. Just listen to the experts and see what they are saying. You're on HN, so I trust you can understand the nuance that scientists use, though I know that sometimes this can get confusing to the public. Like how "disagreement" isn't much of a disagreement but more quibbling over minor details.

I can understand that technological improvements will have improved safety and efficiency.

I definitely agree that we need a spread of technologies to provide for our energy need.

I'm not convinced nuclear needs to be part of that solution though.

> I'm not convinced nuclear needs to be part of that solution though.

That's cool. But just recognize that the scientific community disagrees. Though many have given up on even trying to push nuclear as being a minimal part due to these types of responses. I just want you to be aware of how your personal and non-expertise stance stands compared to the scientific community.

Sorry, but you can't speak for the scientific community. The scientific community is varied, and has a plurality of voices.

Without wanting to be rude, this kind of rhetoric feels closer in spirit to the kind of lobbying that might be associated with an industry body.

Being part of that scientific community, having gone to many lectures on the subject, having personally sat down and having beers with these friends, I think I can make that claim.

Also, if you don't believe me you can just fact check me. Search the internet. Attend a public talk, there's tons! I appreciate the skepticism, but your basis of doubt is that you don't like what I have to say rather than having some other reason to not believe me.

So yes, I would say you are being rude. Especially considering you are calling me a lobbyist. I used to work in radiation shielding and no longer do. I even used to work with the DOE. But I'm not even tied to those things anymore. Seriously, just go talk to some actual scientists. We love to talk about our research.

The scientific community is wide.

You can speak for yourself, and perhaps even the community of nuclear scientists as a whole.

It stands to reason a group of scientists working towards developing nuclear power are going to be proponents.

Most of the people I'm referring to are climate scientists. I'm not saying "nuclear scientists believe" I'm saying "climate scientists generally agree that".

But again, the rudeness isn't the skepticism, it is that the skepticism is caused simply because you disagree with me. I don't even see what expertise you have to disagree with as you're not even pointing to anything except "la de da." You have no evidence that I'm wrong, and I don't expect you to find any (though of course there are scientists that disagree, but that's not what consensus means. Nothing is absolute. You yourself said this). The DOE has plenty of talks that are public (online and in person), I encourage you to attend one, or several. Mostly because they are interesting and I think anyone interested in climate should. And to clarify, DOE is doing a lot of the climate modeling. Yes, they also handle nuclear, but they do far more than that and it isn't the same teams of people.

So either I'm shilling for an industry I'm no longer in, or your preconceived notions are wrong. I'm a bit peeved that your response to me disagreeing with you is to claim that I'm a lobbyist. There is no conspiracy going on here. It doesn't even make sense considering how costly nuclear is and how small of a percentage it is of the power sector. Jumping to conspiracy is a bit odd.

You're very vocal in this thread but your comments don't demonstrate basic knowledge of climate nor nuclear technology. Maybe sit this one out and go to a few lectures before coming back. I'm happy you're passionate. This is a subject I deeply care about too. But in science you have to constantly ask yourself if your preconceived notions are wrong. Because frankly nothing is "obvious" as the general public likes to claim.

But I don't have anything else to say here. You can continue to believe I'm part of this big nuclear conspiracy theory but I just want you to know how insane that sounds to me and others here. There's much simpler and more obvious explanations that this grand conspiracy. Especially since we're also advocating for renewables. I can't even figure out how your conspiracy theory makes sense (yes, I know you're not the only one that believes this). Like why would a conspirator ask you to get more informed in the general principles like climate and renewable energy? I don't get it and I don't think I will ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm one of the few people demonstrating an opposing view.

That's not the same as being uninformed.

This is not the only route we have available. That in itself is a fact.

You seem to believe that without nuclear power we'll have no chance of avoiding climate emergency.

This is quite simply incorrect.

---

'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'

> That's not the same as being uninformed.

That's not why I claimed you're misinformed.

> This is not the only route we have available. That in itself is a fact.

Who said this?

> You seem to believe that without nuclear power we'll have no chance of avoiding climate emergency.

Ditto, because I sure didn't say that. I said something very different.

> 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'

Who's salary? Not mine. I've reiterated this 3 times now.

Get off your conspiracy theory.

> As for waste, it isn't as big of a deal as you might think.

If John Oliver dedicates a whole episode to that problem, it is kinda a big of a deal, isn't it?

Leave it in the ground. WWS is sufficient to transform our energy systems.

> If John Oliver dedicates a whole episode to that problem

I'm not sure. He also got a lot wrong. Here's a response from an environmental scientist that specializes in nuclear waste disposal[0]. Honestly that episode caused me to be more critical of him. Of course it is always easy to fall victim to the Murray Gellman effect, but we should try our best not to and if some authoritative source is incorrectly characterizing a field you're intimately familiar with, you should be more careful with that source in the future. I mean he is a comedian first and foremost and the conclusion does essentially come down to "experts are dumb" which is a little insane to hear and rather insulting. Especially with a topic that is extremely complex and difficult to understand.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/08/24/please-jo...

> Why is nuclear the silver bullet that will save us?

Because you can generate power without adding CO2 to the air, or other pollutants. It works 24/7/365 and it requires no new "science" to produce.

However, the root of your question appears to me to be founded in some misconceptions you have about nuclear power. It isn't uncommon because the information in most popular press articles about nuclear power is over 50 years old.

To put that in perspective, imagine arguing the utility of an electric car when your data point is gas at 30 cents a gallon (the price in 1965[1])?

But to talk about nuclear power with current data about how you would design a power plant (and these are the new designs we're talking about), the risks of them leaking any radioactivity, and the risk to people should that radio activity leak and it makes our decision to keep building fossil fuel plants look pretty stupid. It really does turn the whole question on its head.

Nuclear is demonstrably cleaner, safer, lower risk, and potentially lower cost (although how do you price the cost of destroying the planet right?) than any other baseload technology. It even surpasses hydroelectric in terms of externalized costs of habitat destruction.

But I recognize that if you base your analysis on an idea that any new nuclear plant would be identical to the ones at Fukishima (built in 1967) or Chernoybl (built in 1972) it does seem odd that we would want more of that.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-888-august-31-2015...

I think it's foolish to think we have things 'right' now.

In 1967, I'm pretty certain the engineers responsible thought they had it everything in order.

I take the view we will always fuck up.

With nuclear, the fuck up will always have larger, longer lasting consequences.

Edit:

> Nuclear is demonstrably cleaner, safer, lower risk, and potentially lower cost (although how do you price the cost of destroying the planet right?) than any other baseload technology.

I'd agree it's cleaner if we didn't have the waste problem.

You're making a false equivalence. It's not a case of nuclear or fosil fuels. We have other options.

What I hear you saying is that you have no confidence that we can learn from experience, and that our understanding of the process of radio active decay, and the effect of radiation on humans is incomplete.

If that is correct, then I'd Do you fly on airplanes? Have you compared the risks of flying in 1967 and the risks of flying today?

I have a belief that human ingenuity will be able to generate truly clean power. If you believe that too, then this period of nuclear usage, is a transitory period.

If this transitory period has the ability to create substances that will potentially cause bother to generations living in thousands of years time, I think that's a problem.

Quite simply there are alternatives.

> I have a belief that human ingenuity will be able to generate truly clean power.

There's no such thing as truly clean power. Even renewables have huge environmental consequences. Hydro floods huge areas of land[1]. Renewables and batteries require huge sums of metals to be mined[2]. Solar and wind also take up huge sums of land that could otherwise be left alone. Everything has trades offs, there's no reason nuclear cant be one more tool in the tool shed.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/09/canada-site-c-...

[2]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/electric-vehicles-drive-up-...

> There's no such thing as truly clean power.

Yet

The other replies handle the large issue now, but let me go point by point.

> Why is nuclear the silver bullet that will save us?

Not supposed to be that, as others said.

> The waste will be around for longer than we are. We have no solution other than 'lock it up'.

If we sacrifice a Cubic mile to save the planet that's a god trade. Paul is a lot bigger than Peter here.

> Accidents do — and most like will — happen. How will increasing the volume of reactors not increase this risk?

The Tsunami was far worse than the meltdown; I am afraid people's fear-memory often conflates the two. I'm willing to admit the official stats with Chernobyl might be a coverup, but still, tons of poor people around the globe get sick or die from perhaps-illegal fossil fuel pollution. It's not a worse coverup than environment justice issues in the US.

The annoyance here among pro-nuclear people is that other thing's problems get to slip underneath the radar, but nuclear's don't.

> storage

Consider storage will require tons of lithium. The ecological damage from that mining will also be catastrophic, and the ecosystems might take as long to recover.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do lithium-ion batteries. We have little choice we're going to need more. Same thing with nuclear. Same thing with not decommissioning dams as soon as we like.

The fact is with all routes, avoiding ecological collapse will cause local environmental issues. What irks people is the singling out of nuclear, as if other things didn't have issues too, and other essential systems (like top soil) repair as slowly as some radioactive isotopes degrade.

I saw a report that the reactor at Chernobyl is in danger of starting a new nuclear reaction [1]

Fukushima is going to release the waste water into the sea [2]

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277195-nuclear-reactio...

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-56728068

We have designs now that are vastly safer than Chernobyl.

> Fukushima is going to release the waste water into the sea

Why are you even bringing that up? They're going to filter out basically everything, and the released water will be completely safe.

Anyone that complains about the trace amounts of tritium had better be thousands of times more upset at coal power. Even more, they should see intentional radiation release numbers as a motivator to use tons of nuclear in the short to medium term just to get off coal faster. Coal releases so much radioactive material into the air.

There's a lot of opposition to this plan, as mentioned in the article.

> Anyone that complains about the trace amounts of tritium had better be thousands of times more upset at coal power.

It's possible to be upset by both.

If there isn't another nuclear accident in my lifetime, I'll be happy to say my concerns were unwarranted.

> There's a lot of opposition to this plan, as mentioned in the article.

The opinions of a couple politicians are not reliably based on reality.

The fishing association is not worried about danger, but about sales.

And greenpeace is not going to give an unbiased answer on anything nuclear.

Taken together, that gives me extremely little worry about danger. The fishermen might be right, I guess.

> It's possible to be upset by both.

It is! But if you're not MUCH more upset about coal's radiation release, something has gone wrong.

I notice you didn't come back to me on my last point. Maybe that's something we can agree on ;)

I strongly expect to see zero major radiation releases from reactors that are generation III or later.

If we keep running very old reactors, I'm less confident. And I have not done sufficient research on "II+"

> If there isn't another nuclear accident in my lifetime, I'll be happy to say my concerns were unwarranted.

That might feel to you like a concession, point of compromise, but for us that's still a dangerously too high bar that puts the environment at risk.

That's the nub of my whole argument. I see nuclear energy via fission, as too a big risk.

We had safer designs than Chernobyl in the 1950s. The soviets cut a lot of corners in that reactor.

> Fukushima is going to release the waste water into the sea

So a bunch of nuclear scientists did a calculation and the results sound scary. And Korea is using it as a political tool. Japan and Korea are at each other all the time, though this may not be common knowledge to Westerners. But if you need a sniff test for this to pass, remember that you can go swimming in a nuclear reactor and people actually do, as many may have learned from the XKCD What If[0]. So just take that story and add a ton more water and add convection so the distribution becomes far less homogeneous. It should pass your sniff test now.

[0] https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

That's an interesting link, and point; but my understanding it the water is contaminated.

So is the water in the story for the link. The problem is that contaminated is not a binary function. If the material is sufficiently dispersed in the water radiation levels won't rise much (I say rise because sea water is already naturally radioactive, as most things are. Which one could say that sea water is "contaminated" but that wouldn't be useful). If it isn't sufficiently distributed then the distance between you/a fish/sea creature is going to play a big factor since water is really good at stopping radiation. Basically think about you and your wifi router. If there's a metal wall between you and the router you're not getting a signal. Attenuation is the key concept in both radiation and the wifi router. Though this is obviously the fall back for "if they mess up" which isn't likely.

'Chuck it in the sea' has been the answer proposed by many industry scientists for a long time now.

Even supposed small changes are being seen to have an effect on ecologies and food chains [1]

[1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/radioactivity_in_the_ocean_di...

"contaminated" shouldn't be binary.

Hisashi Ouchi would likely disagree: https://historyofyesterday.com/the-man-kept-alive-against-hi...

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM

Many view fission as a stop gap to fusion. I also think the scale of nuclear waste is vastly over estimated by the general populace.

Generally, it produces very little waste in terms of spent fuel[1] and much of that can be recycled. That does require building newer, modern reactors though.

> The waste will be around for longer than we are. We have no solution other than 'lock it up'.

This is another thing that people don't really understand. Radioactivity is viewed as a monolith in pop culture. There's a perception that a radioactive thing will kill you in thousands of years. In reality, the length of time that something is dangerous is inverse to how dangerous it is, ie, the longer it's radioactive, the less deadly it is (and vise versa). Plutonium-239, the long term radioactive byproduct (24,000 years) is not that deadly [2] compared to the much more radioactive cesium-137 and strontium-90 which both have a half life of around 30 years [3].

1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239#Hazards 3. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/r...

I think it's the fact that it's a stop gap that worries me the most.

Imagine being alive in thousands of years, having to mind the 'very little waste' that stopgap produced.

I think I'd consider the generations that produced it pretty negatively.

> Imagine being alive in thousands of years, having to mind the 'very little waste' that stopgap produced.

As I mentioned, that long term byproducts can be reprocessed or directly consumed by more advanced reactors.

> Logically, renewable and storage on a microlevel seems to make more sense.

For northern countries where wind is the primary renewable sources, there does not exist any clean storage that is currently deployed and getting investments. The current "storage" being combined with renewable are fossil fuels, primarily oil and gas. The subsidize for energy stability goes to fossil fuels, the investment for bigger reserve capacity goes to fossil fuels, the national energy plan here in Sweden as an example is fossil fuels for stability and renewable for cheap production.

Lithium batteries as an example are great when the charge cycle and capacity is measured in hours, like for solar. It works, it is cost effective, and it helps reduce the dependency on fossil fuels. For wind you have charge cycles measured in weeks and capacity demand that can last months.

There are a few experimental project (likely heavily subsidized, and none that I can find that operate on buying wind power and reselling it weeks later), but the flow of money goes very distinctly towards fossil fuels right now. Nuclear provide at least an working alternative, and the occasional accident is a much better future than the non-accidental climate change that is occurring right now.

That said, I would prefer if we simple banned fossil fuels as a strategy to provide gird stability and forced the market to decide on storage vs nuclear.

> Logically, renewable and storage on a microlevel seems to make more sense.

Only assuming technological advances are made that we can't count on. Current day we don't have storage solutions that will do it, and most micro stuff doesn't work well enough to meet current demand anyway....

There is no waste! Our descendants will regard it as magic/mysterious cultural heritage of long forgotten times, much like we do view the Pyramids of Giza today.

Think of all the opportunities, the tourism...

All excellent questions, these should be addressed every time nuclear is considered.

I'm not sure existing nuclear is all that competitive with renewables+storage, but better designs absolutely could be. Better designs also wouldn't produce long-lived waste, and could also transmute existing long lived waste into short term. This will require R&D.

Increasing the number of wind turbines increases the risk of collisions with aircraft. What level of risk is acceptable to you? That's the question, not "will there be any increase in risk at all".

https://www.radiantnuclear.com/

I like these guys but get annoyed at the 1kWH == 1 Typical House. While a case can be made that over a 24h period a house may consume 24kWh the fact is that "typical" houses burst to anywhere between 5kW and 10kW depending on appliances (AC + Freezer compressor + Oven baking a roast and boom you're at 10kW) As a result if you hook a thousand houses to a 1MW reactor you're going to get a crap ton of brownouts.

<raises hand> Two EVs, electric oven, refrigerator, air conditioning here... We installed solar when we moved in but would need massive storage to handle peak loads "locally" at our house.

Burst loads are the wrong number too. You still want to average over many households, but not average over wide swaths of time. Maybe you need to design for a peak of 75% of AC units plus 15% of ovens plus 20% of fridges being on simultaneously.

I imagine the temperature probably doesn't vary enough for a 1k household size area to allow for only 75% turning on the AC when it hits 32C

There are duty cycles to take into account.

True, it is more complex than it might seem at first glance. One of my EE classes had us go out to a power plant to tour it and they talked about some of the complexity (because grid wide you get larger swings). They used to count on something like 80% of the households turning on the oven at 5PM while dinner was being prepared. They had actuarial staff that really dug into these numbers because some conditions would require starting up a 'peaker' plant and that took 3 - 4 hours to bring online from dead stop, about 1.5 hours from a "warm" start.

Would these types of systems not be great for drop-in replacements in natural gas electricity generation facilities? Much like natural gas can replace coal through a plant upgrade.

Not in its current iteration. The biggest advantage of natural gas generators is the possibility to ramp them up and down quickly, making them an ideal choice for peaker plants or load following. For nuclear, on the other hand, the options for throttling the output are quite limited - both physically and economically.

As a mitigation, combining them with battery storage would be an option, but then again it would still be cheaper to use wind or solar instead of nuclear as the source of energy.

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