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Comment by earthboundkid | Hacker News Reader

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?…

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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!

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