Safety of Nuclear Energy | Hacker News Reader

Safety of Nuclear Energy

ourworldindata.org

Conclusion: failing to convert coal-fired power stations to nuclear has killed tens of millions of people since 1970.

I wonder how many lives would have been saved by converting to clean renewables. At least tens of millions.

Using the figures on the ourworldindata page, not many more than with nuclear. Nuclear, hydro, wind and PV all have fatality rates two orders of magnitude below fossil fuels' (per TWh generated).

Renewables are about three times as safe on the evidence - the difference between one fatality every 14 years vs 1 every 50-odd years, compared to tens every year for fossils (again, per TWh each year).

> I wonder how many lives would have been saved by converting to clean renewables. At least tens of millions.

Clean renewables were only really viable in the last 10, maybe 20, years. We could have been building nuclear plants for the last 50.

Do you really think windmills were fundamentally restricted by a lack of technology in the 50s/60s/70s? And that aggressive early solar investment wouldn't have produced what we have now back in the 1980s? Or that battery chemistry wouldn't have been substantially advanced with aggressive funding?

But I do agree we should have made a lot more LFTR style ORNL reactors. Nuclear killed itself with PWR solid rod designs and ignoring the Oak Ridge designs, all so they could have weapons grade isotopes.

Oil has owned our military, political, and industrial landscape. Our "defense department" has force projected all over the globe to enable access to oil, we've fought wars at the behest of oil companies and oil states for a trillion dollars, topped democratically elected regimes to keep oilmen happy, repressed the effects of oil/coal for the oilmen.

If you're going to argue for aggressive funding, you should probably include fusion:

https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png

> But I do agree we should have made a lot more LFTR style ORNL reactors.

Its fascinating reading about all the research online into molten salt designs in the 60's wrt nuclear and its promise that just went ignored (if you take the word of people who worked on it on their blogs) because of things that sounded very much like:

> Oil has owned our military, political, and industrial landscape.

I'm just glad that the rest of the world is not limited to build out for large scale renewable systems (i.e. freaking chile has +200MW and 17.5h molten salt storage sans direct solar radiation CPVCSP plant bidding for under 4 cents/kwh in 2021 and the US has nothing, what a joke the US is for renewable despite all the past research in related fields, but good on other countries taking advantage of it).

I suspect even the sCO2 turbine research will go nowhere towards broad commercialization/utilization in the US and get broad adoption outside of it despite its applicability to nearly every system that converts heat into electricity now.

Sadly, I think nuclear will still go nowhere outside a few places as long as fears around weaponization remain (even the thorium stuff has its downsides from the protactinium -> u233 route, and i've at least seen this stuff pursed for awhile in few EM's leveraging US researchers/companies/consultants).

> Do you really think windmills were fundamentally restricted by a lack of technology in the 50s/60s/70s? And that aggressive early solar investment wouldn't have produced what we have now back in the 1980s? Or that battery chemistry wouldn't have been substantially advanced with aggressive funding?

To a certain extent, yes. Control electronics and especially HVDC use in offshore turbines, where all the economies of scale are happening, were not as advanced as they are now.

No. Solar technology is based on semiconductor technology to a certain extent, and we weren't as far long as we are now in that.

Funding is no guarantee of discovery in research. Yes you can throw more money at the problem to have more people looking at things, but there's an element of creativity in deciding which pathways to go down for experimentation. Discovery is also often (usually?) random and serendipitous: see James Burkes' television series Connections.

In material science and chemistry there is a finite number of paths, because of the finite number of elements involved, but it's still a grind to go through, and people may prioritize/try the wrong ones initially.

More research is more better, but there needs to be a societal base that is fertile for the change in question. Once that base is there, there is often the same/similar discovery popping up from multiple places 'spontaneously':

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries

> Oil has owned our military, political, and industrial landscape.

Oil has not: cheap, convenient energy has. This is because cheap, convenient energy allowed us to get beyond mere sustenance living and industrialize and mechanize work. Oil just happens to be that for the last century or so (after surpassing coal in the Industrial Revolution which kicked things off). Would you have us completely stop modern society?

> Our "defense department" has force projected all over the globe to enable access to oil, we've fought wars at the behest of oil companies […]

The US has been running the globe well before oil companies were a major influence. The US went after Mexico and Texas before oil was discovered there. There was no oil in Cuba or the Philippines.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny

Concentrated solar is not semiconductors, it's mirrors and salts. Perovskites I don't think are, although they aren't a product yet.

Do we need cutting edge fabs for silicon solar cells?

And ORNL-LFTR reactors is the biggest missed opportunity in terms of global warming ever.

It seems to me that NREs do not allow closing that many fossil fuel plants since you need backup power (unless storage, but I have yet to see a big country use storage rather than gas). So, my impression is that they would definitely have saved lives, but not as much.

The lesson we should learn from those millions of lives killed by fossil fuels is that we need to stop burning fossil fuels. Set down a date where no more fossil fuel plants are allowed to be build and put all the remaining plants into planned obsolescence. When the energy prices goes up as a result we then put in corresponding subsidizes in a technology agnostic way and let the market and science decide how we can produce enough capacity and grid stability as cheap as possible under the circumstances of no fossil fuel.

Fighting over renewables vs nuclear now is only delaying the stop of fossil fuel. It time to bring up the old slogan of the green movement: Keep It In The Ground! Everything else can addressed after that battle is won.

Nuclear is a good example of how facts alone don’t win debates or make public policy.

The problem with nuclear is tail risk. This is like showing us how great the financials of Leman Bros. is circa 2007. Okay, cool, I guess, but?…

But nothing is without tail risk. The more CO2 we release, the more we throw the climate out of its historical equilibrium and risk triggering positive feedback loops that will make the planet permanently much harder for billions of people to inhabit.

Renewables are preferable for new energy development, but turning off existing nuclear plants is not good for the planet's future IMO.

What about the tail risk of mismanagement of spent fuel?

We've managed spent fuel for decades with very little incident. Meanwhile continuing to power 80% of the world with combustion of fossil and biofuel kills ~8 million people per year. Comparing the very hypothetical tail of spent fuel risk to current and very real 8 million deaths/year is extremely difficult to justify.

Oh yeah and combustion also causes climate change, which brings in all sorts of additional risks on top of the air pollution one.

Once again, there was never really a 'waste problem' [0], and to the extent it does exist it has been definitively solved [1]

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

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

Painting the history as "CO2 emissions or Nuclear" is misleading though.

If the public money sunk into nuclear (in form of industry subsidies, and military & other national research programs) had been directed to renewables since the 40's, we would have most of today's wind, solar and energy storage tech decades earlier. So in that way nuclear had a severe opportunity cost, especially from today's perspective when we see that it's going to lose out to renewables.

(And of course CO2 emissions could have been reduced decades ago, when we noticed the problem, by capping fossil fuel use without replacement energy sources, since the majority of energy use is non-essential and starting early would have made the transition slow and smooth)

You seems to think research and funding exist in a vacuum. This is not the case. You also seems to think that civil nuclear R&D is expensive. It is, but not that much. Gen2 and Gen3 reactor R&D cost was around 50 millions in todays euros. Gen4 cost was 650 millions in France, and might reach one billion, but since we stopped our planned economy for energy and started subcontracting everything our engineering costs have exponentially risen, even with tech we didn't stop for 30 year like barrages.

I seriously doubt your assertion on solar and energy storage. To much of it relies on fondamental or material discoveries made in the 80s, and 2000 for the graphene (probably the next gen will based of graphene). Maybe the wind tech would've been here earlier, but when you see nuclear enterprise capital and compare it to Boeing/Airbus R&D budget, more likely than not, we would've maybe saved 5, 10 years? Not even sure. France took 5 (5!) year of middling effort to develop a nuclear program. The budget allocated then was big (well, not that big really), but compare it to the Airbus program budget, it is ridiculously small.

If all the tax break money since the 70s, and all the war money since the 40s were spend on fundamental physics, chemistry and geology, yes, we would've a much better tech, obviously. Not happening. Moving one or two billions from nuclear tech (that helped a LOT with discoverability of new materials) most likely wouldn't have any impact.

The civil nuclear power stuff that you refer to is just easily funded incremental refinement of the military applications from way back when, and those had huge budgets that were risky bets. Especially if we account for compound interest of all that 40s and 50s fundamentals research and applications research money, representing the opportunity cost, it's.. a lot. And a lot of time to develop materials (60-70 years).

Agree, but that's the reason why even replacing nuclear research with something else wouldn't have improved at all renewables (au contraire).

Science is incremental. You wouldn't have any of the new materials research without nuclear research. Any. Because you can't understand them if you don't understand the atom, you can't observe them without the electronic microscope, you can't test the interactions without a collider.

Also, scientific discoveries are either focused by the state/profit, or happenstance, luck and opportunity (if Einstein did not work at Bern's patent office, we wouldn't have taken an interest on time and space). And all the new material we think can revolutionize storage are lucky breaks. Supraconductors, especially the new ceramic ones, are complete luck. You could've throne any amount of money on graphene research, i'm pretty sure you wouldn't have had the technology we have now without luck (and electronic microscope).

I'd say "but you're right, the war budget...", but i forgot that the war economy gave use the basics of the computer, new tools, and the cold war was even better for scientific discoveries.

Chernobyl is analogous to the Lehman collapse, and so the tail risk is already inside the data that they're displaying, and actually it is exaggerated since that tail risk is getting smaller and smaller as the tech improves and becomes safer with time.

Chernobyl may not even necessarily represent the tail risk of a nuclear catastrophe. After all, only one of the four reactors melted down.

What is your evidence that the tech "becomes safer with time"?

Early reactors required active safety mechanisms: You had to actively do stuff (such as pumping coolant) to keep them from melting.

Modern reactors are designed to be far more "passively safe" such that failures cause the reactor to shut down safely even if the operators do nothing.

This worked beautifully in fukushima

Fukushima failed because power failed, failing the coolant systems. That was an active system and not a passive. Look at MSR test that were done at the Idaho National Research Laboratory. The heat transference of using molten salt shutdown the react even in the absence of power. This is a passive system.

The EBR-II tests you're referring to were liquid metal sodium, not molten salt. Molten salt is much different (though it also can be used in reactors and may be able to demonstrate passive safety as well)

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

[2] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-11-23-sodium-vs-salt.htm...

Three meltdowns, up to 1 death total from radiation (acutely and estimated long-term). That's a huge improvement over Chernobyl, which killed ~60 acutely and up to 4000 long term from early cancer deaths.

The real death toll of fukushima is the extra climate change deaths resulting from the hysteria it produced. Radiation wise it was really not that big of a deal.

1 death.

Fukushima was old, and by 2008 the IAEA was warning them that the plant could have serious issues during an earthquake/tsunami.

> What is your evidence that the tech "becomes safer with time"?

Why does there have to be evidence for this? Did all technology associated with nuclear safety stop improving at some point? Does it ever stop with anything?

The Fukushima plant stopped improving. I think it's very easy to see how the lack of improvement caused the accident.

What is your evidence that the tech related to the "Fukushima plant stopped improving"?

>What is your evidence that the tech "becomes safer with time"?

Sorry but this just comes off as an extremely ignorant comment. Modern reactor designs (gen3/gen4) are very different from the old Chernobyl/Fukushima reactors, have more safety features and often are passively safe in case of meltdown or coolant loss.

It was also well known that the reactor was unsafe. It was a cash grab by a corrupt government, something that would never happen today.

Which is why I hate when Chernobyl is mentioned as an example of poor nuclear safety.

It is well known that most reactors (at least here in France) suffer from bad engineering and are unsafe. Existing ones suffer a lot of downtime due to various levels of accidents, while ones being built are often delayed due to serious issues (see also: EPR scandals in France, Areva scandals elsewhere in the world).

I agree with the general point of course, but:

> It was a cash grab by a corrupt government, something that would never happen today.

I'm afraid corrupt governments doing cash grabs are unfortunately still a thing nowadays.

Not in the same way as Chernobyl.

Likewise, Lehman may not even necessarily represent the tail risk of a financial crisis, after all the other banks didn't also collapse.

Extreme Value Theory tells us it is hard to calibrate estimates of tail risk but it's not as if we have no data and no grounds with which to do it in the case of nuclear power.

Flippant analogies that are actually flawed analogies upon close examination aren't helping. If there's reason to believe that modern nuclear plant designs could lead to large scale death with a non-trivial probability, far beyond the scale of Chernobyl which had a very small death count relatively speaking, then the case for this needs to be made by outlining the actual mechanism by which this can happen.

Regarding the significantly improved safety of modern plant designs, this was addressed by other commenters.

No, that is factored into the graph. It's like showing that, even with one Lehman Brothers every other year, living in the US during the 2000s would be still vastly preferable to living in Poland during the 1970s.

Indeed: fossil and biofuel air pollution kills as many people every 7 hours as the entire commercial nuclear industry including Chernobyl ever has (including the long-term latent cancer deaths) in its history. Granted, fossil and biofuel make a much higher percentage of total energy, but still!

I believe nuclear can be cost effective. I believe nuclear can be safe. I just don't believe nuclear can be safe and cost effective. We have been trying to solve this nuclear energy problem for over 50 years and we still aren't there.

The issue of renewable energy storage is significant, but look to be easier to solve than how to make nuclear energy cost effective and safe.

Yeah, I can believe that humans can safely operate a nuclear power plant for fifty years, maybe even one hundred, but when your plan is for humans to run the plant indefinitely, you sort of have to take into account that people will eventually get sloppy, take shortcuts, say 'hey, this always worked out before, relax', etc. and meanwhile you run into various blackswan low probability events…

Nuclear: a good bridge technology; a terrible long term strategy!

Missing from these graphs:

- the human cost of (neo)colonial policies required for the flow of nuclear fuel (at least for France)

- the environmental cost of nuclear waste disposal, which is a problem that is unsolved [0] (construction, maintenance) and unaccounted for from what i could see in the data sources ; it is accounted for for fossil fuel in the forms of CO2 emissions

[0] Actually it is solved. Some nuclear technologies have been explored that produce less harmful (non-harmful?) byproducts, but they were from what i understood always discarded by Nation States due to having no military applications.

The human cost of extracting fuel is missing from all energy sources, but it would unlikely change the full picture. Coal mining has a very long history of harvesting human lives, being one of the most deadly profession that have ever existed. Oil in turn has been in the center of wars since world war 1 and the collective number of human lives lost is hard to even imagine. Natural gas as a by-product of oil and coal would only share in the deaths caused by the others.

The more closer comparison would be between rare-earth metals needed in renewables and the uranium in nuclear fuel, but which one wins is questionable. There are more children picking through e-waste than there are children picking through uranium. Mining uranium however is not that great either. Then again, mining rare earth metals aren't great either. Feel free to point to any sources that compare the two in terms of produced energy.

> the environmental cost of nuclear waste disposal

We can compare that to fossil fuels method of waste disposal. Nuclear could release it waste into the air over a long period of time, letting the radiation slowly spread out over a very large area through rain and weather. This is not accounted in fossil fuel as CO2 is only one kind of pollution, with coal power plants actually creating more radiation waste per watt produced than a nuclear power plant. Fossil fuels waste just happens to be released into the air and spread out over a large area/time rather than being stockpiled. Renewables should fare better but you would still need to account for e-waste and CO2 emissions from construction and waste recycling.

All in all, fossil fuels would not look better in comparison to nuclear. The human cost in fossil fuel production would be humongous and the environmental cost of waste disposal would dwarf anything that nuclear create.

Good points. To be clear, my point was not that other energy sources are so much better than nuclear, but rather that we globally need to reduce energy spending instead of looking for a unicorn non-polluting energy source.

In this regard, i believe cracking down on planned obsolescence, implementing strong (>30 years) warranties on every single thing you can buy, and promoting cooperative economic models (reducing "waste" due to competition) would do a lot more for the environment than any plan our governments have put forward.

> Feel free to point to any sources that compare the two in terms of produced energy.

I don't have any. And to be honest, the international supply chain is such a grim landscape that i believe it would be very hard to assess the overall impact of this or that resource being exploited. But all studies agree that the less resources we use, the better is it for all parties.

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