Hacker News Reader

Comment by caddywompus | Hacker News Reader

I expect there will be a lot of comments defending nuclear power, and I agree, it has its place in moving humanity forward to a greener future.

However! I believe that the main benefit of central nuclear plants, is there ability to keep poisonous materials in a single location, so that it doesn't get lost.

For example, the radioactive sources used in radiotherapy units, have been known to go missing due to negligent owners, with truly awful effects to those that discover them without realizing that they are. This short video sums it up pretty well:

- The Samut Prakan Radiation Accident https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxktLtVEH7U - The Goiania Incident https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhL0xQzPSy8

Once the radioactive material is released from a safe container, the cleanup effort to discover and contain it is immense.

And herein lies the problem, it only takes one or two events like this to cause an extreme amount of damage. And its not a problem with the technology, its a problem with human beings. We're forgetful, lazy, and make mistakes. So widespread deployment of many radioactive sources really increases the complexity and cost of keeping track of them.

View on HN

> And its not a problem with the technology, its a problem with human beings. We're forgetful, lazy, and make mistakes.

That is true. Another weakness humans have is our inability to intuit large numbers and probabilities.

For example, it's hard for people to really grok that, even if you added up all the people who have died from nuclear and radiation accidents in all of history[1], including not just the sources you mentioned, but disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, it would be far less than the number of people who die from pollution caused by fossil fuels every month[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...

[2] https://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-...

Definitely, but those figures can't be compared directly, since deaths by air pollution are caused by industry scale deployment of both small and large power plants/generators/engines. I fail to see how [2] is related in any way to the conversation. As I said, I do believe that nuclear energy has a place in current and future energy production.

The other things we humans are bad at, is implementing solutions that last decades. It is inevitable, that over a period of 30 or 50 years, there will be multiple lost small reactor installations. My case in point, is meant to be the aforementioned videos, where an extremely expensive radiotherapy machine can be neglected to the point of abandonment.

What I want to highlight, is the insidious nature of a potential loss of a radioactive source. A small amount of material can contaminate a very large area relative to it's size, and its not something that can be seen or detected without equipment.

And the type of damage isn't as immediate or jarring as say a runaway reaction/meltdown, it would be limited to people who unintentionally handle, or ingest particulate.

For example, if you don't realize that you've been exposed to a material like this, you can carry it around on your clothes, or in to your home, and that's the real issue. You're body would be exposed to radiation over a long period of time, eventually resulting in a higher than safe dose. Any cancers/diseases as a result of this may not even be attributed to exposure, since a person may not have even realized they came into contact with it.

> That is true. Another weakness humans have is our inability to intuit large numbers and probabilities.

I'm not sure if this is meant to be a jab at my comment, it's not my intent to be a scare monger, but I would like to point out these past incidents to highlight the unique nature of the danger inherent to these materials.

That's kind of a false equivalency since fossil fuel plants are much more common than nuclear plants (nuclear generates ~10% of the world's electrical power), and they tend to be highly regulated and maintained, and run by first world nations. But if nuclear was as ubiquitous as fossil fuel plants, it would also be run by poorer nations with less ability to maintain them.

So you can't really compare nuclear plants that exist today with what we'd see if nuclear were as common as fossil fuel plants.

Nuclear power currently makes up 20% of US electrical power. Fossil fuels are 60% of grid electricity. Multiply by 3 and you are there in the US. France is at 70% so they are already there. I don't see any significant deaths from nuclear power there.

I agree that nuclear isn't currently a great solution for stuff like trucks and planes. However for baseline power generation it is one of the best low carbon energy solutions when taking into account storage costs to provide constant power from intermittent sources like wind and solar.

The biggest problem with nuclear is that its too expensive. And that's before factoring in the $187B cost of cleaning up Fukushima.

The "but nobody died" argument doesn't matter. You're still arguing with Jane Fonda in 1979. You need be arguing with economists in 2021.

1) Please stop using fatality comparisons when talking about radiation incidents - it's disingenuous. You need to look at total impact, including negative outcomes like cancers and reduced life expectancies rather than outright deaths.

2) If your argument is "it's better than the worst alternative" then your argument is not very good. You should be comparing to power sources that are not fossil fuel-based, which is the real alternative we want to move toward

> 1) Please stop using fatality comparisons when talking about radiation incidents - it's disingenuous. You need to look at total impact, including negative outcomes like cancers and reduced life expectancies rather than outright deaths.

It's my understanding that nuclear power performs very favorably in these metrics as well. Living near a coal-fired plant isn't very healthy, and probably exposes you to more radiation anyways[1].

I don't really follow the alternative power source news, but I don't think anybody's argument actually stops at "it's better than the worst." Most people seem to think that nuclear power makes a good choice because it's a consistent source of power and has a proven track record (see: France).

[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Comparing it to coal is precisely "better than the worst". Coal is the worst option, and even the US is phasing it out rapidly.

(Developing countries are still using it, and China is still acting as if it were a developing country. But coal simply isn't the alternative to nuclear any more in any developed country. Even natural gas is better for the environment than coal.)

> Comparing it to coal is precisely "better than the worst". Coal is the worst option, and even the US is phasing it out rapidly.

I don't think anybody disagrees with that. The claim is only that there are lots of sufficient reasons for nuclear power that don't stop at "it's not the worst."

Granted, you would also need to do the same for whatever you're comparing it against. Fossil fuels have profound negative impact beyond fatalities, like pollution, supporting cruel regimes, environmental spills, and more. And also climate change.

Dams exacerbate water evaporation and disrupt ecosystems. Solar panels require vast amounts of land to generate significant power.

> 2) If your argument is "it's better than the worst alternative" then your argument is not very good. You should be comparing to power sources that are not fossil fuel-based, which is the real alternative we want to move toward

And what are those alternatives? Renewables need to be backed by a dispatchable source to deal with intermittency. If your country already gets 30-50% of its power from hydroelectricity that's great. But for most places, this means fossil fuels. The reality is that the alternatives like wind and solar are really wind and solar plus fossil fuels.

"Plus fossil fuels" is, again, a markedly temporary situation. Numerous storage methods are still vying for which will end up cheapest. Batteries look like they will end up the most expensive, but easiest to field. Underground and underwater compressed air are being proved out. A GW-scale liquified-air system is coming online in UK. We will need efficient electrolytic H2 and NH3 processes anyway, and both are good for both storage and fuel.

So, burning LNG continues for a while because the equipment is already in place, and nobody wants to invest immediately in what might not end up the cheapest storage, or anyway is not yet nearly so cheap as it will shortly be when volume balloons.

Underground compressed air is compatible with existing LNG turbines. Liquified-air storage has useful side products. Fuel you will make anyway is a good storage medium too.

Global battery production remains in the low hundreds of gigawatt hours annually. And only a small fraction of that is going to grid storage, in the single-digit gigawatt hours. Global electricity consumption is 60 TWh per day and continuing to rise. Alternatives like compressed air, hydrogen, thermal batteries, etc. still remain in the prototyping phase. Whether or not they prove to be viable is totally unknown.

We are going to be in this markedly temporary situation until we experience a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage that yields several orders-of-magnitude improvement. Breakthrough technology that's 10-20 years away often stays 10-20 years away for a lot longer than that.

Since we will not need to rely on batteries for utility energy storage, battery production capacity is no impediment to renewable grid storage buildout.

There are plenty of known viable storage methods, which you oddly omit all of except compressed air. There are no impediments to their implementation beyond simply scaling up; no new materials science, no new physics or chemistry, or industrial process barriers need to be solved. It is just not clear which will end up cheapest in each use environment.

Other, less mature technologies, e.g. electrically synthesizing ammonia and hydrogen efficiently, need to be developed anyway, and once developed, will also be incidentally useful for storage. Their independent industrial demand will drive fast improvement, so they may come to displace the others.

There absolutely are impediments to implementation. Producing hydrogen efficiently through electrolysis demands very effective electrodes which we are still trying to develop, for example. We only know that these solutions ar hypothetically possible, not that they are viable. Let alone viable at scale. Let alone cheaper than existing options.

Until one of those storage methods actually becomes viable at scale, rather than in laboratories, we'll be burning fossil fuels.

You pivot again to hydrogen, which is not among the cheap, currently-viable alternatives being scaled.

My point is that we've already been doing this: exploring various storage mechanisms and pivoting to ones that are more viable, to use your terminology. And so far two forms of storage have proven viable: pumped hydroelectricity and electrochemical storage (AKA batteries). Neither are available at the scale required. The market reveals what actually is viable. If these solutions you allude to are viable, then we should see people offering to build this storage at competitive prices

Will some technological breakthrough not only make these alternatives viable, but superior to existing storage by multiple orders of magnitude? Maybe, but a massive leap like that is not something we can depend on happening.

Again: No technological breakthrough of any kind is needed to make viable the alternatives I cited. (This must be why you repeatedly try to divert attention from those alternatives.) All that is needed is scaling up already thoroughly-understood engineering.

A GW-scale liquified air plant is now under construction in UK, after 100% successful pilot projects. Numerous underground compressed-air projects are running, successfully. Neither depends on even a single breakthrough.

Pumped hydro works, but only in certain places. Batteries work, but are expensive and compete with other uses. Alternatives cheaper than batteries are being fielded today. Until they are ready for full-scale use, NG generation is temporarily adequate. Its temporary use in no way invalidates wind-and-solar, backed by storage of a form to be determined, as a primary long-term energy source.

Multiple orders of magnitude is absolutely the norm for scale-up of mature technology, newly useful, like the examples cited. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous. Who do you imagine you are fooling?

> Again: No technological breakthrough of any kind is needed to make viable the alternatives I cited. (This must be why you repeatedly try to divert attention from those alternatives.) All that is needed is scaling up already thoroughly-understood engineering.

What do you mean? I addressed the shortcomings of the alternatives you cited: Hydrogen has difficulties with large scale electrolysis. Ammonia is just the storage mechanisms for hydrogen, so it suffers from the same problem. You referenced hydrogen and ammonia here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696690), so accusing me of diverting attention is rather strange. Compressed air can only achieve good efficiency if the compressed air is not allowed to cool down, which needs good insulation. Can you provide a source for the GW-scale compressed air project? Because all of the ones I can find are in the hundreds of megawatt hours [1]. Again, we need tens of TWh.

I think you're making the grave mistake of assuming semiconductor scaling applies to large infrastructure projects. This is very rarely the case for machinery and big physical engineering projects. Are we able to build dams for 1/1,000th the price as in the 1930s? Are we able to build jet turbines for 1/1,000th the cost? Or cars? We've had plenty of time to optimize and achieve the vast gains we supposedly achieve. Cars did see a sharp decline in cost, but it took a breakthrough to achieve that: assembly line manufacturing. And even then it was more like a factor of 20x improvement, not 1,000x.

Ultimately, we fundamentally disagree on whether is safe to assume that technologies in either the prototyping or demonstrator phase will become 1,000 times cheaper than the present options. I think it's unsafe to assume they will become viable at all let alone orders of magnitude better than the present options. Clearly you think otherwise, and believe in it with such conviction you accuse those who say otherwise of acting in bad faith. I don't think there's anything more productive to say here other that time will tell.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed-air_energy_storag...

You can be as dishonest as you like, and I will call you on it each time.

I specifically cited ammonia and hydrogen as examples that may someday take over the storage load from the immediately viable alternatives I listed. (BTW, Ammonia is, in fact, not "just the storage mechanism for hydrogen", but is rather the heir apparent to bunker fuel for shipping. An industrial-scale electric ammonia plant is under construction in Norway. We will need just 1000 more of them to fuel all shipping.)

Underground compressed air does, in fact, get excellent insulation from the earth packed around it. Underwater compressed air does not, in fact, need insulation, because it may absorb heat from the water on its way out.

There is no need for air compression to become 1000x cheaper than at present. Air compression is mature technology. It only needs 1000x bigger capacity, achieved simply by scaling up well-understood technology. There is no need for air liquification to become 1000x cheaper. It is already mature, and efficient. It just needs to be scaled up, as we see occurring.

It might not be dishonesty or disingenuousness, it might be simple gullibility. The same person posted a link designed to fool gullible people and then proceeded to demonstrate that he had indeed been fooled by it:

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

He claimed, with this link as backing, that all nuclear waste would fit in a small space, when in fact the link overlooks the vast majority of nuclear waste and considers only a minuscule though important subset, the spent fuel. We don’t even know if the source article is playing more tricks with words, but the mistake with gullibility here is already bad enough.

To give some credit where (malicious) credit is due, I do believe that the creators of the web page may have been striving for the goal of fooling such gullible people in exactly this way on exactly this matter. While technically honest, the site is dishonest and disingenuous in spirit, because it’s promoting such a misunderstanding, with a clear agenda and a not-so-innocent reason for doing so.

1) Fatality statistics are the best measurement we have. Sure, there's a long tail of lesser impacts for nuclear power; there's also a long tail of disabilities and reduced life expectancies for pollution too.

2) How about "it's better than other power sources that can consistently service base load"?

When it comes to base load, nuclear is pretty interesting. I remember reading that some plants sell electricity at below cost during low periods (nighttime in some locations), since they can't ramp the reactor up or down quickly.

It's a situation where both intermittent renewable sources and nuclear plants would benefit from a way to store excess produced energy

Love the base load argument… if only there was a way to store electricity, we’d stop hearing these ridiculous “base load” arguments

You mean, if only there was an economically viable way to store electricity. Still waiting on that one.

Batteries. Economic viability is the next argument when you externalise the true cost (carbon).

Carbon is not the only possible cost to the environment. Building batteries is not exactly easy on the planet either.

You mine a resource (lithium), that can be recycled endlessly with very little loss.

You are right about Cobalt, but it is already being reduced/removed.

It's not even comparable to fossil fuel mining (even though technically it is fossil fuel mining). Because it's recyclable, so we aren't "losing" any material, in the form of converting it to an unproductive/hazardous byproduct.

Deaths from such accidents alone is a poor metric of comparison. Marie Curie for example isn’t on that list.

Doesn't change the end result. Hell, you can add every person who died in the atomic bombings to the nuclear tally (even though that makes no sense at all), and it still won't change the result.

No, you don’t get 2.5 million deaths per year from fossil fuel usage. Though a few seriously flawed studies have gotten some very extreme numbers.

For example respiratory diseases represent ~5% of all Chinese deaths or about 500,000 in 2020. Which is a horrific sign of air pollution except China also has 350 million smokers. Looking at the non smoker population you see air pollution as a major factor, but again not all air pollution is from fossil fuels.

Air pollution is also associated to strokes and heart attacks, but again other factors are involved.

True, it is likely much higher[1], but the 2.4 million I cited comes from an older estimate that used different data.

[1] https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/02/deaths-fossil-fuel...

Yet here’s one saying 1.05 million. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23853-y

It’s easy to find flawed studies with silly results, the underlying reality is rarely so extreme.

Apart from war, what are some other sources of deaths by this type of radiation?

If you mean radiation then it gets complicated, people for example, used to use X-Rays for shoe fittings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope

I have yet to see an estimate for related deaths from such ignorance.

We've already mitigated that problem by not doing that anymore.

Sure, but if you’re planning a new thing saying we stopped doing dumb stuff in the last isn’t a great justification.

The general public became scared of radiation in part because of the rapid flip flop from this stuff is safe and useful to holy shit no don’t do any of that.

> Sure, but if you’re planning a new thing saying we stopped doing dumb stuff in the last isn’t a great justification.

I'm not sure that argument really works though.

When it comes to radiation, we understand the dangers of radiation a lot more now than Marie Curie did, and we can argue the merits of SMR's based on the knowledge that we've gained.

Furthermore, the argument is very overly general. Sure, it's true that people made a lot of mistakes because we didn't fully understand the dangers of radiation at first. But we're talking about SMR's to generate electricity here, and people didn't even fully understand the dangers of electricity at first, either. The same could be said about fossil fuels.

That leads us to a much different conclusion--don't invent fundamentally new things. Radiation and fission aren't fundamentally new. They're understood, and the risks are understood.

The risks of X-Rays where understood years before these where banned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope

For context the Radium girls won their lawsuit from 1927. By 1950 the belief was all radiation exposure resulted in increased risks, yet these things where used into the 1970’s.

Hell, the nuclear industry continued to use known inherently unsafe designs. Fukushima wasn’t really a failure due to a tidal wave, it’s a failure due to requirements for active cooling. Inherently safe means turn the lights off and come back in a year and it’s fine, not everything is fine as long as you keep doing X.

>even if you added up all the people who have died from nuclear and radiation accidents in all of history

The whole area for hundreds of kilometers around Chernobyl is now polluted, for decades and centuries to come.

This affects everyone in that area, don't let statistics fool you. EVERYONE.

While it's a neat point that you bring up about human nature and misplaced radioactive sources, is a portable nuke reactor something that's comparaable to radiotherapy units?

If what they mean is a Small Modular Reactor, they should still be about 40 m^3, and a bit less likely to be left behind.

And because of those incidents, there are new regulations and safeguards in-place to help avoid such events in the future.

But it'll be hard to limit these things to just a few that can be secured really well. There will be lots of potential for an energy source like this in remote or underdeveloped regions, and once you pepper the globe with reactors, good luck having everyone adhere to regulations, and not try too hard to circumvent those safeguards.

Ah that is true. In that case the danger would be in the tracking and storage of fuel elements. Assuming re-fueling is required infrequently enough that a regulator organization could keep tabs on them. Although in that case the danger would be the tracking and safe storage of the fuel elements.

As far as i understand some of the small reactors are designed to be fueled only once in their lifetime - in the factory.

> However! I believe that the main benefit of central nuclear plants, is there ability to keep poisonous materials in a single location, so that it doesn't get lost.

Off topic, but: I often feel that problems related to hard-to-manage waste could be ameliorated by thinking of temporary solutions as "entropy-reducing storage". Especially with recycling — which is currently not cost effective [0] but perhaps could be in the future — we ought to keep the nicely sorted waste separated, and avoid mixing it in with other landfill trash. At a minimum, there's no point in actively increasing the entropy of trash and byproducts. That way, today's landfills could become tomorrow's mines with a lower bar for economic viability.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

Yes, I was really disheartened when I learned that my city only recycles a few types of plastic, and most of it just goes to the landfill. And now its being theorized that oil industries encouraged recycling as a solution, even knowing its deficiencies, so that plastics would be more readily accepted.

Regarding nuclear waste disposal, this is the coolest solution I've seen so far:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy_WJ3mE50

>Once the radioactive material is released from a safe container, the cleanup effort to discover and contain it is immense

Larger than dealing with an oil tanker spil or gas line explosion ?

The main problem with nuclear is potentially global consequences of an accident - small reactors don't have that and people are used to dealing with localised risks.

You are not accounting for opportunity cost here. Yes, there were incidents, and people died, and there will be more. But there are also victims on the other end. People who died because they had to breathe coal. People who died because the power was down or too expensive to run AC or some hospital machine.

When people are deprived from basic necessities, their life revolves around survival instead of moving humanity forward. How many Elon Musks have died or lived a life in which they could not realize their potential because of no access to power? If there was cheap and abundant power everywhere, you could get rid of the whole class of environmental and societal issues altogether, not only saving lives, but greatly improving life quality.

Think of how many problems Internet brought up. And then how many it solved.

>I believe that the main benefit of central nuclear plants, is there ability to keep poisonous materials in a single location, so that it doesn't get lost.

This is a very interesting point. A grid of mostly renewables backed by a handful of centralized nuclear plants sounds robust to my layman's thinking. Both of these things already require a more robust distribution grid than we have now in the USA, but it would serve us well to do that regardless.

I think it would be nice if we could agree as a society that spending money on projects like this is invaluable to our worth as a nation. Is letting a few people be billionaires really that valuable to us as a society that it's worth puttering along and hoping future generations will pick up the tab? They have taken a disproportionate amount of wealth away from society and their taxes should reflect that. It's only going to get more expensive to fix problems like these and younger generations don't have the money.

There was also an incident with Soviet RTG's that were discarded https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23kemyXcbXo

>greener future

CO2 causes the Earth to green. The future is only greener with more CO2. Of all the purported benefits of nuclear energy, this is not one of them.

The fuel here is in tiny containers (about that of a poppy seed https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/triso-particles-most-robu...). You'd have to crack many of them, and that's not likely from an accident. How what's the ratio of bananas to cracked TRISO particle for equivalent radiation?

The reactors can't melt down, so you'd have to physically crack many of these particles and then distribute the results into the air.

These are really interesting! It looks to me like the tiny containers and materials are meant to prevent unintended fission rather than shielding from radioactive decay.

Still, I'd imagine identification and cleanup would be much easier with something like this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com