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Comment by thaway2839 | Hacker News Reader

Will you be factoring in the cost of an accident (you can adjust the rarity of the accident to get your expected value) destroying the entire economic engine of the state?

A lot of nuclear closures make no sense. Germany's indiscriminate shutting down of all the nuclear power plants in the country without waiting for renewable alternatives to be online was a bad idea.

However, specific shutdowns do make sense. A nuclear plant situation upstream of the biggest city in the US, right by the entire city's water supply is very high up in the list of existing nuclear shutdowns that make sense.

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Will you be factoring in the healthcare costs associated with burning more diesel and natural gas? (Not even getting into the externalities of climate change.)

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I thought Kurzgesagt did a pretty good job of breaking this down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM. Basically, no matter how you look at it, nuclear is among the safest forms of energy we have, behind only solar, wind, and hydropower. Admittedly, deaths ≠ costs, but I imagine the numbers would be similar.

nuclear is also incredibly hard to build an accurate model for because the concern tends to revolve around the risk of human stupidity causing major issues.

on top of that, i feel like there is a lot of hand waving involved with the waste. if we really industrialized nuclear fuel worldwide - we would be creating a lot of nuclear waste. theoretically, this isnt a problem.

what id like to see, and may do one day if i run out of projects, is at what risk factor does nuclear equal fossil fuels. not, look how much better it is, but "this is about how dumb we would need to be in our handling of nuclear plants to cause about the same damage as our current system does"

making it apples to apples like that would make it much clearer.. % risk of this or that is tough to internalize for a lot of people. but is active sabotage of 1 out of every 10 plants necessary to be as bad as current energy? or is just 1 plant failing enough to make nuclear worse and we are just saying the likelihood of just 1 plant failing is astronomically small

Fossil fuels have enormous global risk, so that's not bad for nuclear.

The problem is that nuclear is competing against renewables, not fossil fuels. So, new nuclear needs an argument for why it's better than renewables, not why it's better than something that's on its way out anyway. The usual arguments, intermittency of renewables and land use, don't work well when examined closely, at least when justifying new nuclear power plants.

First of all, we’re currently closing nuclear plants that would could otherwise have a lot of life left, so this isn’t merely about whether to build new plants. But putting that aside for a moment:

> The problem is that nuclear is competing against renewables, not fossil fuels. So, new nuclear needs an argument for why it's better than renewables, not why it's better than something that's on its way out anyway.

Is it, though?

From where I’m standing—wind and solar just can’t seem to produce enough energy. I mean, look at the top link. Solar doesn’t even get its own category. So we fall back on fossil fuels.

Nuclear seems to be the only non-carbon source of power we have today that is actually capable of generating electricity in the amounts our society needs. Build a few more nuclear plants, and boom, New York’s electricity could be CO2 free, in a few years!

> wind and solar just can’t seem to produce enough energy

"They are not producing enough energy, therefore they can't produce enough energy." This is an obviously wrong argument, since there is nothing preventing vast expansion of renewable capacity. The world is constantly hit by 100,000 terawatts of sunlight; total world primary energy consumption is 18 TW.

> Nuclear seems to be the only non-carbon source of power we have today that is actually capable of generating electricity in the amounts our society needs.

This is simply false.

i am equally interested in seeing it compared it to alternative fuels in the same manner. the point is more about putting nuclear into perspective with human error. and what kinds of human error are necessary to make nuclear dangerous.

I feel there is an assumption that there will always be enough people at every plant who are fully competent, which i do not think is the reality we would see if we replace most energy needs with nuclear

Sure, like Fukushima, which is rare, and had a single death?

The economic damages of a 30km exclusion zone that close to NYC might be significant, even without deaths.

Also the Japanese government is projecting a total of somewhere between $200 billion and $600 billion to clean up the mess left behind -- amortizing that on the $/MWh produced by the power plant would probably lead to slightly more expensive power...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi...

The proper way to make the accounting is to sum the cleanup for Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and then divide by the 120-180 operating nuclear plants and further divide by the 25-35 years of continuous operation:

           ∑ accidents
  ---------------------------
   ∑ fleet  x  years operated

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