Comment by YeBanKo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by YeBanKo | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear energy is clean, until it is not. When something goes wrong it can easily go terribly wrong.

Such 180 degree swings in public opinion seems dangerous. In 2018 Macron talks about reducing France' reliance on nuclear energy [1], now he declares its a tool to achieve energy independence [2].

Building, maintaining, upgrading and dealing with issues caused by nuclear reactors is a very engineering and science heavy. I am curios if there is enough talent to be able to do it? Will this rhetoric be attended with enough investment in education to make sure that we have talent to service this need for generations? Nuclear energy skill is akin to space exploration, just because the nation had Apollo program and could put a man on the moon 50 year ago, does not mean it can do it now. If it were not for Elon and SpaceX US would not have an ability to bring astronauts to ISS without a third nation. Financial investment alone won't solve it, as you need time to establish pool of qualified people.

"We are going, for the first time in decades, to relaunch the construction of nuclear reactors in our country and continue to develop renewable energies," – so people who launched it in the past have long retired? The newes reactor in the US was launched in 2016, the newest plant is 1996, so 20+ years ago.

And there are still problems to be solved with nuclear energy. The most obvious one – nuclear waste. No one wants to have in their backyard. Once it is stored, it is essentially a permanent commitment to keep it safe there until a better option emerges. A better option will emerge if there is a constant effort to find it. But what if something goes wrong, how will the public and politicians react? Are they going to reverse 180 again? Fukushima scared politicians, that were afraid of saying "nuclear energy" in public for 10 years.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-11-france-nuclear-reactors-macron...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/macron-says-france-w...

When something goes wrong it can easily go terribly wrong.

Coal-fired power stations release significantly more radioactive material into the atmosphere than any nuclear accident[1]. If your concern is about radioactive material then worry about coal ash first.

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

So, coal isn't the only option besides nuclear power...

Massive banks of toxic lithium or lead based batteries to store solar energy? Wonder what the end of life plan for those batteries will be. And you thought nuclear waste was bad…

There is no end of life, but only recycling

> When something goes wrong it can easily go terribly wrong.

I encourage you to look at the numbers for yourself. The equivalent baseload power technologies are all WAY more dangerous.

Go and tally up the human casualties from nuclear over its entire history. Use the most damning numbers you can possibly find. Go ahead and include the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki if you like. Include any count of potential cancer cases too. Even using the most biased, openly political casualty counts you can find, it is challenging to get to 1.5 million over the entire history of the power source. If you stick to relatively credible sources you'll certainly be below half a million.

Now look at the human casualties from coal when it's working properly. No accidents, just regular power production. The first duckduckgo result for me estimates about 8.7 million deaths per year, not including accidents, bombs, or non fatal casualties.

The casualty rate from nuclear's entire history doesn't even approach the death rate from coal, oil, or gas in a single year.

> nuclear waste

One person lifetime of electricity creates about 350ml (about a coke can) of solid nuclear waste. We know where that waste is, and what it is doing. We can monitor and control access and keep people away from it.

In contrast, one person lifetime of coal power produces hundreds of thousands of TONS of waste, much of which is also radioactive, but lets not forget about the toxic heavy metals and carbon. Most of that waste goes into the atmosphere, where it cannot be tracked or controlled at all, and where it causes millions of deaths per year. To be fair a lot of it goes into the water and ground, too.

The fact that there are options AT ALL for nuclear waste puts it miles ahead of the competition.

Nuclear is by far the lowest carbon, safest, lowest waste universally available baseload power source ever invented. Casualties from nuclear aren't even a rounding error compared to the alternatives on the table.

You are absolutely right however, that it is highly volatile politically.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... is a nice reference for easy comparison, but really, duckduckgo it yourself.

In the US, nuclear goes wrong before construction even begins. Typically, many billions of dollars, sometimes tens of, are spent, rolling into a broad selection of pockets for years before the project is, finally, ignominiously cancelled. Often a great deal of concrete has been poured. No one is indicted. The money is just "gone".

Are you referring to 2 new units at Vogtle? What scares me there is that there were already few acquisitions and reactor manufactured filed for bankruptcy. Seems like entities that started it aren't the same, that are finishing it.

And all for 2GW, provided it ever produces any power at all: "We spent $30B, and you have nothing. Give us more $billions, and maybe you might get something" does not inspire confidence.

Imagine how much solar that $30B could have bought.

> Nuclear energy is clean, until it is not.

Why not go Thorium?

And they produce no waste?

Far, far less than normal nuclear reactors.

But the real reason I'm replying is to ask why the waste factor is only ever brought up for nuclear, and not for coal (which also emits radiation into the atmosphere), wind (do you know how old turbine blades are disposed?), gas (where does the CO2 go?), etc.

Nuclear waste is such an overblown risk. If something is highly radioactive, it won't be radioactive for long. If it is lowly radioactive, it isn't a big problem to begin with. Conflating these two things so that people think that waste is both highly radioactive and radioactive forever was a fantastic trick by the environmental lobby, and one that has almost certainly doomed the ecosphere since instead of relying on clean nuclear power, we continued to rely on fossil fuels, adding decades of emissions to the atmosphere. Talk about a Pyrrhic victory...

I follow along regarding CO2, because it has the most massive cost.

However, I am not convinced that the blades are near the problems regarding nuclear waste

The question is how long do you have to deal with that waste and how much it costs for that entire duration.

No, that's not the question at all. You are lumping together all forms of nuclear waste, and applying the long-term storage requirement of the least dangerous waste to the dangerous waste that is only radioactive for a few decades.

Pretending that there is even a need to securely store material for millennia when equally radioactive products are found everywhere in the Earth's crust is disingenuous. Below a certain level it isn't any more dangerous than loads of other chemicals we have lying around that nobody cares about.

Is there any working non-research reactor producing power anywhere in the world using Thorium?

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