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Comment by CyanBird | Hacker News Reader

Biggest issue with older nuclear plants is the material degradation as a consequence of radiation, after a some decades of constant irradiation steel can become as brittle as glass, which is not only not reversible, but it also means that the actual rebar and concrete surrounding the core becomes damaged and the only way to replace that is to rebuild the whole core

I am rather against setting up new reactors, given that they are so centralized on the matter of costs, management, overruns and of course safety, the more safe you try to make them, the slower to build and more expensive they will end up being which is far from an ideal situation, but I am of course fully in favor of refactoring old ones, but it is important to understand that even when there might be political will to redactor them, that might just be technically unfeasible

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Safety concerns are moot when the coal alternative will kill orders of magnitude more people.

All of the above is politically moot as long as leaders and parties can get away with bandying around fantasy land policies of running major industrial economies exclusively on renewables.

Perhaps this story is a tiny glimmer of hope that one day it won't be possible to get away with that cop out. We've wasted a lot of decades just to get this far though.

But your own point is itself moot, given that we are not comparing nuclear to the dirtiest most lethal of fossil fuels, but nuclear to composite solutions of renewables+batteries/electricity storage or renewables+natural gas

When Germany closed nuclear power plants after Fukushima much of it was replaced with coal power plants.[1] So I don't think his point is moot at all, it's actually quite a reasonable argument to make here.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w26598

> it's actually quite a reasonable argument *to make here*.

Yeah, but as you know Germany, and German discussions do not encompass the whole world, so you can certainly bring me points from specific countries, France or US could be other ones, but they also have their own idiosyncrasies

But as I was saying, the core argument for Nuclear decommissioning is not to compare it to the absolute worst energy generation scheme that exists, by that metric then I could mention that using PeatBog for energy generation is "not that bad an idea" compared to Coal.... Which is of course, an awful idea by itself....

> Yeah, but as you know Germany, and German discussions do not encompass the whole world

I never pretended to be arguing for the entire world, the article is about closing existing nuclear power plants in Germany and my argument is limited to that.

> But as I was saying, the core argument for Nuclear decommissioning is not to compare it to the absolute worst energy generation scheme that exists, by that metric then I could mention that using PeatBog for energy generation is "not that bad an idea" compared to Coal.... Which is of course, an awful idea by itself....

But we're not simply comparing it to coal because it's the worst energy generation scheme. We're comparing it to coal because that is what replaced nuclear last time Germany decommissioned its plants.

Its either coal or nuclear. Solar is not even remotely a competitor. Gas and renewables are still carbon.

> the more safe you try to make them, the slower to build and more expensive they will end up being

That doesn't follow. We have countless examples across multiple industries on technologies that became cheaper and safer at the same time.

If you try to make the old designs safe (created for weapons manufacturing first and energy production second), then sure. However, there are newer designs that are cheaper to build and safer to operate (can't 'meltdown', for one).

"Refactoring" old designs is not aways feasible. You are very limited in what you can do. Maybe you can replace the core with a similarly sized one, but what about everything else? Any significant changes in (say) your cooling system and you are now looking at an entirely new plant.

> That doesn't follow. We have countless examples across multiple industries on technologies that became cheaper and safer at the same time.

Well, that is because nuclear energy is unlike "multiple technologies and industries", it is a highly politiced industry which when it has failed, it has done so spectacularly and at high localized costs

All the updates and changes after high profile accidents such as Fukushima are highly expensive same with review of being built and existing reactors which bloat budgets and schedules, this is precisely one of the big issues Westinghouse and Toshiba had post fukushima

Currently on a bus, so I can only answer to the initial excerpt, when I get home I'll see if I can answer the rest

The money cost of 10 all-new nuclear reactors is minor when compared to the economic cost of electricity prices doubling and tripling again, gas and oil prices doubling again until EOY 2022. Rolling blackouts are not unreasonable to expect.

Industries have moved east and west from Germany because energy is just too expensive (besides too expensive labour due to high state quota as well). In Brandenburg, Chemical plants are threating to shut down because gas prices are out of whack (50% of gas price is tax). This is an extremely high cost for a national economy to pay.

Major consumer energy seller E.on has stopped selling household gas delivery contracts. Transportation cost in gas, diesel and electric car terms is skyrocketing as well. This makes all goods that are getting shipped more expensive. Germans are the poorest people of Western Europe. After tax, salaries are quite low. €500 to a €1000 more in yearly energy cost is a significant burden on many households, dampening spending in any other area including long retirement saving/investing.

All of the above will deconstruct industries, ruin household finances of the already pressured middle and lower class, and set the expectations for years to come when it comes to regulatory politics --- which during the past 20 years were the equivalent of shitposting on 4chan, just dressed up in nice suits and sitting in ideologically blind party councils.

10 all new power plants are chump change compared to that.

Oh yeah, it might very well be the case for 10 "all new" nuclear plants

The issue is that because as I mentioned above, you have a cursed trifecta, you can't have reactors be "safe", "reasonably priced" and "without schedule overruns" at the same time because all of these are inherently conflicting interests such as the Westinghouse/Toshiba collapse has shown, just yesterday there was a thread here in HackerNews of all the corruption inherent to the project, how even when they knew that it was impossible to meet deadlines they still kept saying that they would do it, because of highly profitable tax rebates linked to the run-up to the accorded milestones

Only "happy" cases where several reactors have been built on schedule might be France, or right now in China, but both of these where done from a government "national defense" perspective, not from anywhere near to be free-market schemes, the UK I believe also recently canceled a sets of Nuclear reactors again, for safety concerns after Fukushima which led to slight re-designs and therefore schedule and cost overruns

It would be neat if this werent the case, but here we are, and closing ones ears and eyes wont make these structural problems go away either

I think you are making a cofusion between thermal fission reactors and fast reactors where neutron radiation is indeed a problem. Rebar and concrete in fission plants ages due to thermal stress plus the usual culprits (humidity, oxygen), not necessarily neutron radiation.

This is not entirely correct, alpha and beta radiation damage the crystaline and quasi-crystaline structures of metals and other materials

Even when the reactors themselves, generally rest on light or heavy water, the steel, titanium and other metals and materials nearby the pellets or rods suffer greatly as a consequence of radiation, so it is not a matter of just neutron degradation, but a generalized problem of the physical interaction between radiation and the molecular structures of the materials

Sadly for my case, my materials science course on University was very, very weak, but last year I found this MITOpenCourse which covers this topic on detail, I would highly recommend it to absolutely everyone interested on the topic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjZjVUWMEz0

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