Nuclear power helped prevent ~2M deaths in the last 50 years | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear power helped prevent ~2M deaths in the last 50 years

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316 pointstorts246 comments

The linked tweet doesn't provide a citation or context for the "helped prevent ~2M deaths" claim. But there is work in this area which suggests that "~2M lives saved" in the last 50 years underestimates the benefits of nuclear power by a lot.

One commenter here writes

> What is the actual claim here? Nuclear power didn't prevent any deaths, after all everyone will eventually die for one reason or another. So it must be something like two million people would have died earlier without nuclear power, but by how much?

That's a better way to think about the problem: not "lives saved," but life-years saved. Calculations of life-years saved are necessarily sketchy, but there is at least one promising preliminary effort [1]. See especially page 22.

[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/production-sitebuilder-v1-0-1...

The idea that people are simultaneously intelligent enough to understand the somewhat nuanced argument that nuclear power is safe, but also so stupid that "2 million lives saved" makes more sense to them than just a number of QALYs is, I think, an abject failure of science journalism. If you explain everything like everyone is 5, you reap what you sow.

For those unfamiliar with the unit, QALY is quality-adjusted life year. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

Life-years saved is a step in the right direction, but still the wrong metric to focus on in my opinion.

Healthy life-years is a much better metric to optimize.

If we get people living to 200, but 120 of those years are in a miserable and extremely debilitated state, I consider that a failure compared to average life span of 100, where only 5 years are in an extremely debilitated state. i.e. getting 95 good healthy years + 5 bad ones >>> 80 healthy years and 120 bad ones.

I suppose you can make an argument that extending your miserable years can help a person survive long enough to eventually take advantage of body and mind rejuvenation tech, so there is some point where absolute maximization of life-years might make sense.

This is QALYS. It's how the UK allocates health care spending.

The UK allocates healthcare in a pretty humane, efficient and, ultimately, (whisper it!) communist manner.

That doesn't sound very communist to me. Moreover, while the British certainly prefer their healthcare system to the American system (and I probably agree), I've never heard them describe their system as efficient (on the contrary, they seem to talk about it as a money pit).

The amazing thing is that despite being a money pit, it still manages to deliver better overall value than the US "system".

It's not really amazing, it's just that not everything is in reference to the US system. When Brits comment about their system being a money pit, they aren't always thinking about the US system as their frame of reference. This seems to be a stumbling block for us Americans, or at least for Americans who are passionate about healthcare reform.

Experts regularly rate it as one of the most efficient health systems, so whoever you're talking to is ill informed. Probably listened to too much propaganda from people who want to adopt the widely hated and less efficient American system instead.

Hm, as a German, I shudder at the thought of potentially being dependant on a system that regularly breaks down during standard influenza waves in the winter [1] and that has fixed-amount budgets for individual sickness [2], so your tooth better splits during the first few months...

Is the NHS better than the US system? Maybe. But it is by far inferior to the French, the Spanish or the German healthcare systems.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/24/winter-flu-c... [2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dentists-run-out-of-cash-...

You're comparing apples to oranges by using a different metric than the parent is using.

I was talking specifically about efficiency:

> Despite regular criticism, the National Health Service (NHS) is effective when comparing the government spend versus the outcomes of human development and lifespan. While critics point to Switzerland achieving the lowest death rates in Europe, or Germany having a consistently quality health care system, they don’t compare these to the level of expenditure.

> In fact, the UK has a higher life expectancy than Germany, with lower health care funding than in other large economies. The Swiss spend $3,079 more on health care per person than the UK, while Germany spends $1,993 more per person than the UK. Critics can’t ignore these massive differences in expenditure when debating the outcomes that the NHS provides. If the UK matched Swiss expenditure per person, an additional $206 billion would be spent on health care annually.

The correlation between the lifespan of a whole population and the dollar amounts spent by the government (which BTW probably shouldn't be compared across countries with different costs of living), is presumably pretty confounded.

I'm not trying to build this argument from scratch, I'm just telling people who get their info from other sources that the commonly accepted opinion of the experts in this field is that the NHS is an efficient health service.

If you don't accept that then feel free to write a letter to their academic journals and correct their work. I’m sure they’ll be really interested in your uninformed knee-jerk reactions to things that your gut doesn't like the sound of.

Point is: as a patient, I don't care much about "bang for the bucks", I care about whether or not I get the medical attention I need when I need it.

> In fact, the UK has a higher life expectancy than Germany

Life expectancy seems to be very similar, tbh [1]. The metric "money per patient vs. like expectancy" also does not include differences in cost of living (which is higher in Germany and Switzerland) and demographic differences (on average, the UK is younger than Germany and Switzerland [2])

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=life+expectancy+uk+vs+g...

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=median+age+uk+vs+german...

> Experts regularly rate it as one of the most efficient health systems, so whoever you're talking to is ill informed.

Maybe.

> Probably listened to too much propaganda from people who want to adopt the widely hated and less efficient American system instead.

Brits don't have much propaganda for the American system, and I doubt the British psyche frames every aspect of British life in reference to American life. That said, your zeal for the UK system and passionate distain for the American system are duly noted.

>Brits don't have much propaganda for the American system, and I doubt the British psyche frames every aspect of British life in reference to American life.

The rest of the world actually pays more attention to america than america does to it.

A lot of brits have family and friends in america. Theyre at least dimly aware of the insane medical bills and bankruptcies.

> communist manner

I think the word you are looking for is "collectivist".

This is a strange shift in responsibility. Wouldn’t it be better to say: “Coal shortened the life of so and so many people”? After all If there were neither coal power (or other air polluting power) nor nuclear those lives wouldn’t have been shortened either.

Yes. This is an attempt to boost nukes, but however much better it makes nukes look, it makes renewables several times moreso.

If it is retrospective, it doesn't really say anything about renewables because for most of the last 50 years they haven't been [meaningfully] feasible. The debate going forward is still entirely valid because nuclear has upsides that contrast with renewable. It should be part of the discussion.

It is still a rather strange shift in perspective. We don’t count the people saved by taking public transit, we count the people killed by cars. Speculating what was and wasn’t feasible for the past 50 years is even stranger.

Usually these comparisons have an implicit all else being equal because you can get into some real funky speculations with alternative history without it. For example, if we had neither coal nor nuclear how different would the energy market be today? Would there have been more innovations in renewables and the current technology would have been reached in the 80s? Or would we have implemented our infrastructure to maximize energy efficiency? How many lives would that have saved?

You get the point. This practice gets unnecessarily complicated really fast. I agree with parent that the only reason to say that “nuclear saves lives“ over “coal destroys lives” is that you have an agenda to promote nuclear over alternatives without mentioning those alternatives.

City planners do make estimates on how much traffic is reduced by introducing more and new public transit. They also make estimates on reduced traffic accidents when building news roads and redirect traffic away from more dangerous paths and those close to high risk areas like schools.

We can also compare similar sized locations and compare outcomes. How many lives dies to traffic accidents in cities prioritizing bike lanes and mass transit compared to same sized cities that prioritize car travel?

We can also count how many people that die to air pollution related illness in countries with a lot of coal power and compare that to cities with a lot of nuclear power. We can also look at countries like Island or Norway, through countries that can exclusively depend on hydro/geothermal power has a fairly low sample size. With coal we can get a fairly massive sample size just looking at the scope of a city.

Indeed. The logic goes: Vehicular traffic kills so-and-so many people. We can significantly lower that number by reducing vehicular miles traveled. Options include better bike infrastructure, better public transit, mixed zoning, lower speed limits, etc.

If a city engineer would invert the logic and start with “Bicycle lanes have saved so-and-so many lives”. That would be rather odd wouldn’t it?

If I search for "Bicycle lanes lives saved" (and alternative version of the search string) I find plenty of articles and even studies with those words in the title. Here is one:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2022/03/09/bicycle-...

In the United States, just under 1 percent of commuters travel by bicycle, Patz said. Increasing that slice to 6 percent—the level in Madison, WI—would avoid 20,000 premature deaths per year, he said

> That would be rather odd wouldn’t it?

Maybe I read too much news but No, I don't find it odd. Building safer roads, reducing traffic, improving traffic safety, does save lives. Reducing air pollution saves lives too.

It's not about "boosting nukes" it's about countering nuclear energy FUD (mostly about how dangerous nuclear energy is). Renewables would probably be comparable, but I'm very skeptical about your "several times better" claim. Nuclear energy and renewable energy are both very low carbon sources with very few non-pollution-derived deaths (rooftop solar exceeds nuclear energy for deaths, even including nuclear anomalies like Chernobyl IIRC). So there's no way that the carbon gap between fossil fuels and nuclear is significantly larger (much less 3x larger) than the gap between fossil fuels and renewables.

What stops nuke construction today is that it costs a hell of a lot more, and you don't get any kWh out for years, if ever. Most usually, lately, you pour in $billions for years and get nothing out but a lot of scrap concrete.

I don't know that it costs "a hell of a lot more" for a unit of reliable energy, but yeah, you can deploy renewable energy in smaller units more quickly (it might take you a decade to build out a GW of nuclear capacity or a GW of solar capacity, but at least in the case of solar you don't need the full GW to complete before you can start selling power). However, to be clear, this is the economic argument, not the health argument that the OP was debating.

Nuclear power is clean at the plant but the fuel has a very dirty production pipeline. Further, plants are estimated to have a carbon impact around the same or worse than natural gas because their supply chain is so expensive. Instead of the carbon coming from burning the fuel, it comes from the enormous amount of work that goes into keeping a nuclear power plant running.

HNers love to shout about the environmental impact of semiconductor production for solar panels and mining for batteries and even permanent magnets used in electric motors. But apparently reactor fuel comes out of the ground and is refined based on ...wishful thinking?

It's all moot. Nuclear power is not being deployed by utilities because it is one of the most expensive forms of energy generation. With almost a century of enormous subsidization and research, it has only increased in cost. Wind and solar have plummeted in cost. Wind is currently the cheapest, with solar hot on its tail. Solar continues to fall at around 10% a year.

Last year in the US alone, and only accounting for grid-scale projects, wind and solar have replaced nuclear at a 6:1 ratio. When you account for commercial and residential solar and wind, it's an even higher ratio.

Solar cells cost $76 per watt in the seventies and now it costs thirty cents per watt. That's a 250 fold reduction.

Wind has gone from 55 cents per kwhr in the eighties, to 5 cents today.

Nuclear? More expensive than it was in the eighties.

With HVDC transmission technology seeing wider and wider use, and well as battery technology plunging in cost: everyone in the industry and government sector considers "what energy source do we go forward with" as solved.

It's not just cheaper: it doesn't have any of the numerous concerns nuclear does. Solar panels can be recycled (or simply resold for applications where the 10-20% reduced capacity doesn't matter, ie where there's plenty of roof/land available relative to energy needs), and the biggest problem with wind turbines has been figuring out how to recycle the turbine blades when they're EOL, something that is now solved. GE is turning blades into concrete, and Vestas has figured out how to recycle blades into like-new fiberglass.

Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward except the nuclear industry.

It's unclear that battery scaling will happen in time to reach sharply negative carbon emissions, or that solar and wind will meet future energy demands. Our kids need to put all the carbon back in the ground, which means we need to put the first 10-20% back ourselves. That would double global energy consumption for decades, assuming we started today.

Your supply chain carbon arguments have a fundamental flaw: Transportation and the grid need to decarbonize regardless of which technology the power plant uses.

Solar panel production is being bootstrapped with coal based power plants. That doesn't imply coal plants will be needed moving forward, or that industrial (bursty, scheduled consumption) electicity will be scarce.

The fact that US nuclear plants are riduculously economically inefficient doesn't imply plants in the rest of the world are similarly bad, or that the technology is infeasible. The US environmental movement intentionally sabotaged the industry through the second half of the 20th century. Also, efficient, safe nuclear plants have been operated for decades in other countries.

Anyway, we're clearly headed to a situation where we have effectively infinite clean electricity during the day, thanks to solar.

The real questions are whether energy storage devices are cheaper than nuclear, and how economical it is to time shift energy-intensive industrial processes (basically building 2-3x more factory, but idling it at night).

I'm hoping there is some bursty carbon capture technology on the horizon, where buying more equipment for a higher burst capture rate is cheap, so the electricity produced for the quarter of the day where there's a massive surplus isn't wasted.

We need to do that anyway, and it would greatly reduce nuclear, hydro and energy storage demand.

Cost for storage is falling even faster than solar or wind ever did.

All that is unclear is what will end up cheapest, in any particular area. In many places, the poorer round-trip efficiency of chemical synthesis (hydrogen, ammonia, hydrocarbons) is offset by the massive usefulness of synthesizer output after the tanks are full. That is, when the tanks have been topped off, the excess output generates revenue.

Solar generating capacity has become so cheap that needing 2x, 3x, 4x more, for whatever reason, is no blocker.

Even if batteries and solar get another 10x cheaper, that's not enough to make it through winter in some populated areas.

A whole home backup battery is $10K's, and likely stores under 24 hours of normal usage. Buying 90 of those per house (for three months of power backup) would cost millions per house today.

A bright overcast day in California can easily drop solar output by 50-75%. Up north, it's much worse, and those days can come in multi-month bursts.

Much of the US south will be uninhabitable according to current climate projections, which increases demand up north, creating distribution problems that haven't been solved. Also 40+ state megastorms are becoming common in the US. What happens if the whole continent is cold and cloudy at the same time?

I guess you're propsing synthetic natural gas, or similar?

Batteries are the most expensive storage medium. No utility will use those to keep more than a few minutes or hours of backup. Pumped hydro is cheap and reliable, but each site has a strict upper limit on how much it can store.

Synthetic anhydrous ammonia, and hydrogen, are the favored utility-scale media. They can be stored, but more importantly they can also be shipped in from the tropics, and most importantly can be sold when the tanks are full.

Ammonia is not great for shipping to due low gravimetric energy density. At the same time, ammonia cycle efficiency in a fuel cell is low, and fuel cells are expensive.

Hydrogen is a shipping nightmare, as you well know.

So at this point we are comparing the cost of a full NH3/H2 backup energy generation, plus the cost of a full renewable energy grid with at least 50% overproduction and hours of battery storage, plus the cost of storing 100 million tons of NH3/NH2, as well as the cost of NH3/NH2 production, and funding of generally idle overproduction in countries with a better climate (!!)

Liquified hydrogen carried at atmospheric pressure just needs insulated tanks. We already have a lot of experience shipping liquified natural gas. It can probably be carried in the same tanks.

You can burn ammonia where you burn natural gas today. It is probably not suitable as fuel for aircraft, but otherwise it is entirely good enough. Ships burning bunker oil can be converted burn ammonia just by changing out tankage and plumbing.

But ammonia fuel cells will only get better, never worse.

Building out a H2/NH3 system will be massively expensive, but a tiny fraction of the cost of that much nuke capacity. And, the H2 and NH3 are valuable industrial feedstock, so none of the production capacity ever sits idle.

Doesn't storage and transport of hydrogen introduce a lot of difficulties that don't exist with other liquified gases, such as penetrating into steel and making it brittle?

Hydrogen embrittlement is a problem at high pressure and temperature. Liquifying sidesteps that.

Scaling battery storage does seem easier than scaling nuclear. They are mass producible as small modules and can utilise less skilled labour in factories. Grid scale developments have negligible civil engineering requirments, ridiculously quick to build and can work on small or large sites. They are easy for investors to understand and insure. And the underlying technology can piggy back on the cell phone industry and will be required for electric cars.

Also, by the time we get to nuclear scale out it may well be competing with hydrogen also.

I don't think people understand the scale of storage required to make decarbonization through renewables feasible. The USA consumes 500GWh of electricity every hour. And electricity is only about a third of total energy consumption. 8 GWh is one minute of electricity storage, 20 seconds of total energy storage. We'll need and estimated 3 weeks of storage to decarbonize through renewables: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...

By comparison, the US just needs to build four nuclear plants for each one that exists currently. To achieve a 100% nuclear electricity grid. A bit less than that for decarbonization since we have some hydroelectric power.

Just four new nuclear power plants for every existing plant is still a lot of plants.

There are 93 active reactors in the USA today. That means we need to build between 350 to 400 more reactors. There are currently only 2 new reactors under construction and 11 more planned (6 of these are NuScale modes with only 77 MW Capacity). The last reactor to open was at the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee in 2016, and before that 1996 in the same plant. Both of these reactors started construction in the 1970s.

If we “just” need 350-400 more, it is gonna take us ages to get there.

Building nuclear plants at the same rate as we did in the 1970s would get us there in 3 decades. You write as though this is some Herculean task, but if the US didn't reduce the pace of nuclear construction in the 1980s we would have had a decarbonized grid by 2000. It's not just hypothetically possible, this pace of nuclear construction has historical precedent.

By comparison, nobody has any realistic plans to decarbonize fully through renewables. The plan is to burn gas for ~40% of our electricity when intermittent sources aren't producing, and cross our fingers while we hope for a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage. Plans to decarbonize through renewables assumes that hydrogen storage, thermal batteries, or something else will provide effectively free energy storage.

It is not fair to extrapolate the building speed of the 1970s to today. Especially not with nuclear reactors. We don’t build things like in the 70s anymore. There are safety and environmental standards which weren’t being observed back then. And that’s a good thing. It is not a coincidence that things slowed down in the 80s. The 3 mile island partial meltdown happened in 1979 and it left a mark. If we would still be building and running our reactor like we did back then, but had 5 times more reactors to maintain, we can assume that the probability of a full meltdown and a major nuclear accident would be far higher. Chernobyl serves as a reminder of what can happen if safety standards are not adequate.

The labor and logistics situation is also completely different from today then it was in the 70s. Today’s megaprojects tend to go way over budget and suffer significant delays. Land acquisition is more complicated (and again that is a good thing as many building project back then tended to displace a lot of minority residents) and a much smaller proportion of our labor pool are construction engineers. This leads to a longer and more expensive building process. As an example the only two reactors currently under construction have gone at least $10 billion over budget and are 6-7 years behind schedule. And these are reactors in the existing Plant Vogtle in Georgie. I imagine a whole new power plant would suffer even worse logistics problems.

> Plans to decarbonize through renewables assumes that hydrogen storage, thermal batteries, or something else will provide effectively free energy storage.

This is only partially true. Plans also include a significantly more efficient energy usage. People are pressuring governments to significantly increase investments in green infrastructure. This includes more robust energy grid, electrifying railways and ferry terminals, increased building standards for efficient power usage and retrofitting old buildings to similar standards. We don’t need to replace carbon power 1:1 if we patch up the inefficiencies of our current energy use. There are also hopes for better battery technology and carbon capture. A carbon capturing gas burning power plant is not an unrealistic advancement, nor is solid state and molten salt batteries (all of which exist today at varying levels of economic feasibility; none less feasible then new new nuclear). Meaning that we can bridge that ~40% without emitting more greenhouse gasses and without new nuclear.

Three mile island was due to a pressure valve failure, not a design flaw in the pressure vessel, secondary storage, or steam generators - the components of a reactor that form most of the cost of construction. And the reactor meltdown was contained. The safety standards held. I'm not sure how people try and spin this into evidence that the reactors were unsafe.

You're correct that the 1970s construction isn't the same as modern construction though. During the 1970s, series of the same reactor designs were built. As opposed to most modern construction, which are typically the only reactors of a given kind built in a given country. Serial production is much cheaper than one-off production.

Electrifying railways and other transportation is going to increase electricity usage, not decrease it. Only about a third of total energy consumption is electric, and most of the rest needs to be electrified as a prerequisite to decarbonization. So assuming that electricity consumption is going to decrease is a very dubious prospect.

I didn’t bring up Three Mile Island to argue that enhanced safety standards back then would have prevented the partial meltdown. I brought it up to demonstrate that it caused a shift in policy which resulted in slow-down in reactor build-up. Three Mile Island happened despite the safety standards at the time. We don’t know the probability distribution of a nuclear meltdown but we can safely assume that it is a function of relevant safety standards and a total number of reactors. USA decided to mitigate the risk by both limiting the growth of new reactors and increasing the standard. This was a logical choice. If USA had done neither other accidents would be happening now with greater probability then it did in the 1970s.

The point I'm making is that the increased cost of nuclear wasn't due to greater safety standards. It was due to lower rates of construction, losing the economics of scale of serial production.

I’m backtracking the debate here so feel free to ignore this.

I just watched the latest Technology Connections video about heat pumps[1] where he talks about the total energy savings in replacing gas stoves with heat pumps to provide residential heating, with total energy savings up to 5 times. This goes to show my previous point about how “[w]e don’t need to replace carbon power 1:1 if we patch up the inefficiencies of our current energy use.”

So to answer your concern that:

> Electrifying railways and other transportation is going to increase electricity usage, not decrease it.

All else being equal, yes. However we are not going to replace the energy consumption 1:1. Electrical railways have the potential to be far more efficient in the energy use. Especially if you consider the potential increase in traction allowing better track usage which will pull super inefficient cars and lorries from the road and onto the tracks.

Also a minor correction:

> So assuming that electricity consumption is going to decrease is a very dubious prospect.

No, I don’t assume that. However I am hopeful that we can easily decrease our total energy consumption as we electrify. Meaning that if we are still pumping gas to put into our newly electrified infrastructure and consumer systems, there is a potential that we need to pump less of it for the same benefits because of how much more efficient these new electrified systems are over the old fossil fuel powered ones.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFEHFsO-XSI

Even if heat pumps are more efficient, replacing gas heating with heat pumps (like what much of Germany is going to have to do) is still an increase in electrical load. Similarly with railway. Electric rail engines may be more efficient, but the existing diesel engines are totally unrepresented in current electrical load.

Even if total energy consumption goes down, huge amounts of fossil fuel usage in transportation and industry needs to be electrifed. The fact that they may be more efficient doesn't change the fact that they are totally unrepresented in current electrical energy usage. I stand by my point: decarbonization means our electricity usage is going to grow significantly as existing fuel-based energy is converted to electrical energy input.

But hitting those big numbers is the whole point of scalability. It may be easier to build a few hundred giga factories than a few hundred nuclear plants. What you get is less useful, but politically and technically simpler. And work in other industries make storage more viable. Those HVDC links that America should build anyway make storage more viable. Reducing costs in renewables make storage more viable. Even reducing costs in nuclear power could make it more viable.

The Tesla giga factory produces 35GWh of batteries per year. It would take ~14 years for a giga factory to produce just one hour's worth of storage. We need days at least, potentially weeks depending on the mix of renewables. Again, the scale just isn't there for batteries.

This is why renewable evangelists assume something like hydrogen storage, or compressed air will deliver nearly-free storage. But that's just hope, who knows if these approaches will actually be competitive.

By the time those 14 years are up we would also have had to throw out the batteries multiple times from degradation.

And 35 factories lets you hit the 12hr mark within five years and deliver an 85% decarbonised grid. That may not be better but it could be more achievable.

> but the fuel has a very dirty production pipeline

Not really. You need very little uranium to operate a plant, and a lot of it comes from decommissioned bombs. When we were mining it in the US, it caused far fewer problems than coal or natural gas.

>Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward except the nuclear industry.

This is provably false on many fronts. There is a growing recognition that nuclear is the only low carbon source that can produce substantial carbon-free power in all weather conditions and all latitudes.

"There were over 50 additional nuclear reactors under construction in 2020, and hundreds more are planned primarily in Asia."

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/energy-nuclear-power-...

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/nuclear-power-energy-...

https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/03/23/tech-billionaires-ral...

Nuclear may or may not become the dominant energy source, but to say "Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward" is simply incorrect.

Nuclear power should be exactly comparable to other types of power.

Deaths during construction. Carbon produced in construction.

Deaths caused by mining and transporting fuel. Carbon produced by that.

Deaths caused by consuming fuels. Carbon for that as well.

Deaths caused by accidents during the lifetime of the power source.

Deaths caused to wildlife and pollution.

Deaths caused by decommissioning and deconstruction. Carbon for that too.

Then lifetime for nuclear power station, vs oil, coal, gas, wind turbine, solar.

Finally you can do an unbiased comparison of each.

Nuclear power has saved many lives by not requiring dangerous coal mining, particulate emissions, and climate change effects.

That's the real trolley problem: they have to be powered by SOMETHING.

The nature of the carbon production is important. Carbon from wired electricy is different from embodied carbon from battery electric vehicles, and both are different from CO2 equivalent emissions from the chemistry of the industrial process itself.

After all, end game is you use a carbon neutral technology to power itself, emissions from energy usage go to zero. Similarly, solving carbon emissions for batteries cleans up energy storage.

Also, deaths due to climate change dwarf all the other sources combined (except, maybe, for deaths from coal emissions), so direct deaths are a second order effect that can be ignored in practice.

OurWorldInData has a lot of data for these types of comparisons: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

but feels says nuclear bad...

A retrospective analysis of the benefits of nuclear power avoids accounting for one of the major consequences: the nuclear waste, which remains harmful/deadly for thousands of years.

And so is CO2...

Lead and mercury spewed out by coal plants ends up in the ocean and is also deadly for very long. I'd rather have poisonous metals in storage than floating around and accumulating in the food chain.

>which remains harmful/deadly for thousands of years.

Which it has in common with things like acid mine drainage and waste from a bunch of other industrial processes.

Of course, solving the former "just" requires employing a small army of personnel to make sure that the effluent is getting cleared from those mines properly, maintaining tailings ponds (and fixing them when they leak), and (since this is the perennial hypothetical for nuclear waste disposal) understanding that a bunch of people from the hypothetical neo-Stone Age civilizations are going to die once that goes away because they're necessarily going to be incapable of chemical analysis of water downstream.

Perhaps it's unfortunate for most of humanity that storing waste in on-site casks is an effective enough solution; if the waste was more dangerous, we'd have dealt with it already. Instead, we can just leave it sitting there and tilt at windmills.

I'd rather have an exploded reactor and evacuated surrounding area every 50 years than I would an uninhabitable planet. But maybe that's just my obsolete 1970s/80s optimism showing through; modern humanity is much happier with the historically-compatible "use unreliable sources of power and disconnect the poor quarter at night" strategy.

Sadly coal miners are exposed to more radioactive material.

Nuclear waste is either or. Either we survive as a species and know where it’s buried in that 10,000 year container deep underground where everyone knows. Or we fail as a species and lose the technology to dig that deep ever again.

And it doesn't stop after the coal is mined, either. Coal ash and tailings are quite toxic.

Now that there are cleaner alternatives we don't need new nuclear anymore to save lives.

The only cleaner alternative with fully predictable and controllable power delivery is hydro.

Even hydroelectric power isn't entirely predictable:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/06/california-shuts-down-major-...

And good luck if a dam fails:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

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

Just like each nuclear plant is a "ticking nuclear bomb", each dam is a ticking dam bomb :) I forgot where I heard this from. Anyway, a dam failure can cause hundreds of thousands of deaths within minutes.

And hydro is a full capacity already pretty much everywhere in the EU at least

In Czechia, we don't have enough wind or sun for generating much power, and the available space for hydro isn't ideal either.

If we don't need anything except the cleaner alternatives, we should start by banning and issuing laws against burning fossil fuel for connecting to the energy grid. This naturally include imports, as buying energy generated by burning fossil fuel outside the nations borders is just as bad as if the burning occurred inside.

At that point people can choose between all the non-fossil fuel alternatives and pick what attributes they favor.

No you're right china gets a free pass to strip mine for batteries and solar cells with slave/prison labour... then we all sing that solar in the west is great...

I'm just waiting for the day all of the humans required to keep a one of the older, less safe designs running all become unavailable and the people required for disaster management when it melts down are also unavailable and the world experiences a completely unmitigated meltdown. I really don't think this is out of the realm of possibility within the next hundred years. The assumption here is a societal collapse of sorts where say 90% of the population go away. IIRC there were something like 600,000 people who responded to the cleanup of Chernobyl, and something like 4% of the radioactive material of a single reactor was all that leaked into the environment. I sort of see nuclear power plants (at least certain designs) as a ticking time bomb that'll potentially leave large parts of the planet uninhabitable (or maybe just really high rates of thyroid cancer in the remaining population) for the 10% that remain in a post collapse world.

Nuclear does have a great record on paper. It's the non-linear behavior that scares people. And when troops roll up and start shelling nuclear power plants and people go "oh... oh I didn't consider how it might function under these conditions" that that non-linearity rears its head again and people get pretty cold on nuclear when faced with situations like that.

> I sort of see nuclear power plants (at least certain designs) as a ticking time bomb

But that's just progress, right? Even now we still do stupid things with regular chemicals despite knowing not to.

Every chemical process evolves and gets safer. 1st gen nuclear power stations were/are potentially able to meltdown. Newer designs can't. But we can never be safe from human stupidity and wars.

For example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_industrial_disasters

And even recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion

Somehow people will ignore those disasters as they're not nuclear, but Chernobyl+Fukashima everyone remembers. It just feels like "meltdown and waste" whilst genuine concerns, aren't really the conversation-ending arguments people pretend them to be.

(edit - I live within 15 miles of a nuclear power station, and I'm completely comfortable with that).

I think you miss my point. My frame of reference is society has collapsed and the _people_ that keep nuclear safe are no longer around and this has the potential to cause a Beyond Design Basis Accident the likes of which could render large portions of the planet uninhabitable.

I'm generally fine with nuclear as long as society can maintain itself and the data back up what the proponents of nuclear claim. I'm just suspecting that every reactor that could and would meltdown if humans were no longer around to attend to it being left to meltdown completely unmitigated would be a disaster of epic proportions.

Agreed.

But I think the accident severity distribution for a nuclear power plan is dramatically more heavy tailed than that for other severity distribution for other power sources. That is, the impact of an individual accident for a nuclear plant can reasonably be orders of magnitude beyond the impact for a non nuclear plant.

I don’t think that’s usually taken into account and I do think that swings the cost benefit analysis into a net negative relative to other options.

Yeah, if people can throw around "deaths due to air pollution" it seems pretty legitimate to throw around "lives saved due to nuclear".

It might seem legitimate but I disagree that it is. It needlessly promotes one alternative over unmentioned others, giving people the sense that the only mentioned alternative is the only sensible one.

Take a version of the trolley problem for example. A trolley is heading towards group of people tied to the tracks. You have the option to pull a lever and divert the trolley to another pair of tracks, but it will hit an engineer working on those tracks. You state that pulling the lever saves all these lives, but unmentioned is the alternative to derail the trolley to a runaway zone which saves everybody.

In this version of the trolley problem you can count the deaths due to inaction. Is it right however to shift the rhetoric and talk about how many lives saved due to one particular action without mentioning there was an alternative?

It's an understandable impulse to assume that every article is framed in reference to the thing you're passionate about, but considering renewables weren't generally feasible (i.e., hydro and geothermal are older but not generally available for obvious reasons) until relatively recently (and even still, its feasibility for reliable base load generation is dubious), it's a certainty that this article is positioning nuclear relative to fossil fuels, not renewable energy. Even if renewables were available the whole time, it's perfectly reasonable to talk about the lives saved by nuclear even if renewables would save a few more (and to be very explicit, the renewables-only crowd reliably exaggerates the lives saved--some renewable energy sources kill more people than nuclear, even when accounting for disasters like Chernobyl).

By the same logic, Hydropower has saved 3 Million lives in the last 50 years. Efficiency and insulation probably saved even more.

Sure. Did you think this was a counterpoint to my comment? Or what's the relevance?

You said:

> to be very explicit, the renewables-only crowd reliably exaggerates the lives saved--some renewable energy sources kill more people than nuclear, even when accounting for disasters like Chernobyl.

I don't see how that's meant to be a rebuttal. I don't know the figures, but I wouldn't be surprised if hydro (replacing carbon) has saved a lot of lives. My quote was referring to people claiming that per unit energy, renewables are dramatically safer. Hydro is great where available, and renewables are important. There just isn't a compelling reason to rule out nuclear energy at this point.

One thing that always bugged me about the trolley problem is that it omits the question: “Why are all these people tied to the tracks? Who is responsible for tying them? Why am I responsible for pulling the lever, but not the criminal for tying the people? Or even the police for failing to stop the criminal?”

This is the same sense that I get when I see people promoting nuclear as live saving technology. It is not on nuclear plants to save people from pollution, it is on the coal industry to stop polluting.

If people were angels, there would be no need for government. Unfortunately, the fossil-fuel industry is going to pollute unless they're prevented by regulation. The industry selects for people who are willing to put profits over moral responsibility, so society can't rely on them not to pollute any more than we can rely on murderers not to murder.

The 2M number is referenced here[0]

[0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...

The study is from NASA: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen&

If nukes prevented that many deaths, imagine how many solar + wind will prevent.

The point here is that each $10B spent on new generating capacity displaces some amount of coal generation. If you spend your $10B building nukes, it displaces A million tons / year of coal output, if you spend $10B building renewables, it instead displaces B million tons.

And B is much larger than A, because a GW of solar + storage is much cheaper than a GW of nuke.

The corollary is that each $ diverted from renewables to nukes is not just harmful, but brings climate disaster nearer. Best, of course, would be to stop diverting money to fossils, but all we can do about that is build out renewables + storage as fast as we can. Renewables will be running at 100% at all times, and each kWh produced displaces a kWh of fossil generation.

Displaced fossil generation in most markets is methane gas, because methane gas is cheaper and therefore preferred. But! anywhere coal is being used at all, they will prefer to cut coal output because cutting coal saves more money than cutting gas.

A particularly good example is Germany, where they cannot get enough natural gas to meet their needs, and are burning coal like nobody's business. Every last kWh of renewables + storage that can be put on the German grid, provided it is steady-enough output, displaces exactly that much coal.

The cost of storage is plummeting even faster than of solar or wind ever did, so there is some short-term sense in delaying storage build-out until it is cheaper, so you can buy more of it. But in the big picture, building out storage at any price is much, much better than waiting.

In the meantime it's okay to take 2 minutes to celebrate that nuclear wasn't such a bad idea.

We should just have doubled down on it 50 years ago.

So much geopolitical trouble would have been avoided if bad actors in the middle east and Russia wasn't flushed with cash.

So who do you think is one of the largest providers of uranium in Europe?

The arguments of Germany not being so dependent on Russia if they would have left their nuclear power plants running longer has been debunked several times. I believe this is largely nuclear power lobbyist taken advantage of the current situation. The EU is even more dependent on Uranium from Russia than gas. 20% of the natural Uranium and 26% of the enriched Uranium used in the EU comes from Russia and Kazastan [1]

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/ukraine-krieg-eu-...

That is only because that's the cheapest source, compared to gas which is bought from where the pipelines are coming from.

The amount of uranium needed for power plants is fairly small, it can be transported from wherever and there's plenty available from Canada, Australia and South Africa for example. There are potential mines in continental Europe too, it is a matter of cost and politics to choose where to source it from.

its easier to stock decades of energy supplies in uranium than in oil/gas

As below commenters have pointed out this is a choice. Uranium can be sourced from many locations. It can also be processed in Germany if they had wanted (Germany is a part owner of Urenco which also has a small enrichment plant in Germany amongst other locations).

To steel man your argument though in the context of funding Russia’s genocide in Ukraine when comparing Germany’s use of gas vs if it kept its nuclear plants operating we should look at the Euro per joule cost of the gas bought from Russia vs the Euro per joule cost of enriched U bought from Russia. I suspect we are talking orders of magnitude difference. But that information is conveniently not being provided in this article.

Neither is discussed the ability to easily stockpile a couple of years of fuel supply as many plants have done, which right now would enable you to continue operating while spinning up supplies from elsewhere.

Another note regarding the claim in the article: “For the operators of so-called WWER reactors, Russia is therefore even the only supplier of custom-made hexagonal fuel rods.”

Westinghouse can make these fuel assemblies, they started on this for Ukraine. Framatome I believe has also offered to do this. There’s nothing secret about Rosatom fuel assemblies.

If nuclear power is such a great idea, then why has it never become the dominant technology globally despite many decades of lobbying from the nuclear industry? Technologies that are strictly superior tend to dominate in the long run. Yet, nuclear power has always remained a niche player even in countries where there was not a lot of strong, organised opposition.

Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that nuclear power suffers from a lot of issues that have never properly been solved. And despite claims to the contrary, it is certainly not completely safe. The fact that dozens of Russian soldiers in Ukraine recently suffered radiation poisoning after digging trenches in the Chernobyl exclusion zone just highlights how long-lasting the environmental impact of nuclear accidents is. Admittedly, they should have known better, but how many exclusion zones like that can we afford to have globally from future nuclear accidents that are virtually guaranteed to happen eventually?

> why has it never become the dominant technology globally despite many decades of lobbying from the nuclear industry?

Because the anti-nuclear lobby is more powerful? Also the oil/gas lobby has had people in pretty damn high positions affecting these things. Belgium had an ex-Gazprom consultant as their minister of energy. Who - to no-one's surprise - wanted to shut down nuclear plants and move to Russian gas while they build up renewables.

Also the incident in Chernobyl was 99% a political problem, not a technical one. No-one dared to tell their superiors "no" or "I fucked up" or "I have a problem". This compared with the lack of notification caused most of the eventual deaths. Just telling everyone to take iodine for a few weeks and not eat any of the currently growing plants would've cut down the amount of cancers in the area by at least half.

But humans are irrational and politics does exist.

Poor communication and politics is a bigger challenge than engineering or technology. And if you actually want to build something then you have to work within the constraints of society. Sometimes you have to pick C# or Java even though you know that Lisp is the best. Getting something built is more important than technical idealism.

>...Also the incident in Chernobyl was 99% a political problem, not a technical one.

The Chernobyl design was dangerous enough it would have been illegal to build in any other country.

Is always other's people fault

Because the government makes or breaks the commercial power industry, and we only have commercial nuclear power generation as a byproduct of weapons development, while environmental groups have been extremely successful using fear to make sure that new reactors are prohibitively expensive to build.

I wonder what history will say about our environmental priorities. Will we be pilloried for doing more to harm the environment in a misguided attempt to save it?

Because nuclear is hard to finance.

Our economy is better at financing smaller things, and iteratively optimize them.

Which is probably why wind and solar are beating nuclear by now, the cost of building one unit is much lower. We get the economies of scale from building thousands of units.

Nuclear is too expensive for capitalism to work it's wonders.

> it's okay to take 2 minutes to celebrate that nuclear wasn't such a bad idea.

And just 20.000 years to celebrate that the area will be as safe as it was before 1970.

180 years at least if we feel optimistic.

> a GW of solar + storage is much cheaper than a GW of nuke.

Storage is far from a solved problem. There are many solutions for storage but we have yet to see one truly work at scale.

False. Pumped hydro is already working at scale, and being built out as fast as capital can be scared up for it.

Pumped hydro can be used in what may be a surprisingly larger range of places than usually imagined. First, it does not need an existing dam in an existing watershed. It doesn't need any watershed, just a hill, ideally with a depression. A circular dam can even be built on top of a hill, and that is being done, although it is better if you don't need to build all the sides.

Pumped hydro can be used where there is no hill, if a deep cavity exists underground. Then, you pump water up and out of the cavity to charge it, and let it back in when you need power. Deep cavities exist all over the world. You can combine a hill reservoir and a deep-cavity reservoir to get enormously more energy storage.

Pumped hydro has been demonstrated using a spherical tank deep under the ocean. There, you have a pump/turbine at the bottom of the tank, and you pump the water out to charge it. Amazingly, you don't need a pipe down to the tank, because water vapor fills vacated space in the tank. You just need a wire. The tank doesn't need to be very big if it is placed deep enough; the deeper it is, the more "head" you have.

Liquifying air is extremely mature tech. So, storing liquified air is something already done at scale, for decades, and can absorb peak renewable power. Power is released by letting the gas vaporize through a turbine, warmed by ambient air, or even by heat pumped out in the first place, if banked. A 100 MW liquified-air storage facility is under construction in Chile.

Synthetic ammonia is mature tech. A GW-scale ammonia electric-synthesizer plant is under construction in Norway. Anhydrous ammonia can be burned in a gas turbine.

Synthetic hydrogen is mature tech, and being built out in volume. Efficiency will only ever increase, as better catalysts are discovered and put in service. You can store hydrogen in the same underground reservoirs where natural gas is stored today.

Iron-air batteries are mature enough tech that mega-factories to produce iron-air batteries are already under construction, to deliver in volume in 2023.

> False. Pumped hydro is already working at scale, and being built out as fast as capital can be scared up for it.

But not all countries have a suitable topology to build pumped hydro at a meaningful scale. And building everything from scratch isn't really feasible.

Where are you going to get these deep cavities? Where do you do pumped hyrdo in Las Vegas or Phoenix? Lots of solar, no economical way to store the excess right now.

You list lots of technologies that are "mature" - but maturity isn't enough. They have to be economically viable, and until they are they will continue to exist mainly in posts like yours.

In the meantime it's nuts we keep ignoring nuclear and continue to frame discussions around nuclear in the context of light water reactors, which are the worst kind of nuclear tech we have. There are other reactor designs that are far more practical, fail safe (do not require active cooling, coast naturally to a stop if interrupted, can actually burn what many erroneously refer to as nuclear waste, etc.)

We should be doing ALL of the above, not just arguing about nuclear vs. some other tech. We need it ALL.

China is charging forward with liquid thorium/molten salt reactors. If they establish the tech before we do - watch out. The industrial revolution forward saw the greatest expansion of wealth and democratization of power for humanity - and the bulk of that was unlocked by cheap energy! Energy is the greatest force multiplier and we are FAR to casual about just how important it is.

Americans are starting to figure that out with the policy changes brought in by the recent administration - energy pricing affects all aspects of modern society and in pretty dramatic ways. Europe is going to find out if they keep poking the Russian bear too. Especially Germany after they turned off all their nuclear plants. Increase reliance on fossil fuels and then antagonize our greatest provider of them - bloody brilliant!

We can spend money on nukes, or spend the same money building out renewables and storage. The latter produces a great deal more power per dollar, and starts delivering immediately. Nukes cost a great deal more, and often produce exactly 0 kWh, ever; but in any case not for many years, and many billions over budget.

@ncmncm - thank you for posting this. you cut my interest learning curve by years

https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

You probably misread my comment which was about energy storage.

There are some counter arguments to what you said, but I agree for the most part.

The exact numbers are below for anyone curious.

The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...

Those prices don't include storage or over-provisioning for cloudy / still days.

Nuclear is still likely cost effective at night, or in the rainy season. The only other carbon neutral technologies rely on special geographical features (geothermal, hydro).

One way to think about energy moving forward is reducing the problem to heating houses with heat pumps during stormy weather, or at night.

Solar, wind and batteries basically imply we'll have surplus energy in all other scenarios.

Yes and nuclear power also needs overprovisioning, storage etc (nuclear power plants can not follow load, they just generate constantly). The question than is would the cost for nuclear overprovisioning or solar/wind overprovisioning be higher.

BTW there have been several publications that performed modelling on large integrated grids that found there would be very little overprovisioning needed if we have a Europe wide grid (it always blows somewhere). Fortunately, the European grid is moving in this direction anyway.

> nuclear power plants can not follow load, they just generate constantly

nuh-uh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuc...

Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute.[7] Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control.

This is not only about being able to increase capacity.

A nuclear plant is capital expensive, and it requires to be used as much as possible to be cost competitive.

If you operate them at 33%, that is equivalent to their power output costing 3x as much, because it costs the same to build and run, 33% or 100%. But their output is already not competitive at 100%. Power offered at more than 3x the going rate finds no bidders. Your debt service demands revenue from sales of 100% output.

You have to take whatever you can get for the power, even if it doesn't cover operating cost, to pay down the capital you spent building. When it becomes clear that you cannot bring in enough to pay for operations and debt service, you have no choice but to declare bankruptcy.

Of course, all this is foreseeable. So, you don't get the capital to build at all, because who wants to loan money that will predictably be defaulted on?

> BTW there have been several publications that performed modelling on large integrated grids that found there would be very little overprovisioning needed if we have a Europe wide grid (it always blows somewhere).

I tried for a long time to find such publications (for or against renewables). Could you like a few of these? Thanks.

Thing is, solar and wind cost are still trending sharply down, with no floor in sight. Nuke cost has gone up. So, no matter how badly nukes fare today, they will fare much worse in ten years. And, storage cost is falling even faster than solar or wind ever did.

So, provisioning 2x, 3x, 5x solar + storage will still be cheaper than nukes. Storage in the form of transportable liquids, even where round-trip efficiency is low, is very attractive because you don't need long-term storage if you can import what you need, in a pinch, from the tropics. And, whenever the tankage you do have is full, you may sell the extra production for industrial use. The world can absorb an effectively unlimited amount of hydrogen and ammonia overproduction.

There’s still a significant environmental cost to renewables. Mining the materials for wind/solar and then to produce them (often this is powered by coal). And there’s no real plan for how we will safely dispose of used solar panels. And there are land use issues with solar unless it is done on rooftops, which is much more expensive. We need nuclear and solar and wind and storage. One is not always better than the others. They all have trade offs and a role to play.

This is all false.

Disposing of used solar panels is trivial: the metal gets recycled, the silicon gets recycled, the cadmium and the tellurium get recycled.

There is absolutely no land-use issue for solar: solar is compatible not just with roofs and parking lots, but also with reservoirs and canals, where it cuts evaporation and operates more efficiently, and even with pasture and farmland, where it increases yield (by reducing heat stress) and cuts water demand (likewise). There is a lot of pasture and farm land. Ranchers and farmers like an extra revenue stream and better yield.

Wind, also, coexists neatly with pasture and farming.

In any case, even were all solar farms single-use, the amount used up for that, for all our needs, would be less than is devoted to fossil fuel extraction today. So the land-use claim is simple FUD.

Each dollar diverted to building nukes instead of renewables brings climate disaster ever nearer, because a dollar of renewables displaces more coal than a dollar of nuke, and immediately, not ten or twenty years from now.

> Each dollar diverted to building nukes instead of renewables brings climate disaster ever nearer, because a dollar of renewables displaces more coal than a dollar of nuke, and immediately, not ten or twenty years from now.

It's really odd to see these arguments being made right now. Germany is burning mostly fossil fuels now and and in an energy crisis because they decided to shut down all their nuclear and do renewables.

We can install 50% of our new generation as solar and 10% as battery storage, but just as building a nuclear plant takes a decade, it would also take decades to replace our existing generation with solar and wind. The ability to produce solar panels is not going to increase by 10x overnight regardless of demand. Building solar and wind implies needing other sources of power for when the sun isn't shining in the wind is not blowing. If you don't build nuclear you build natural gas or keep using coal. Energy storage can help a lot, but we are maxing out our battery production as is. Maybe pumped hydro is the solution, but we aren't really building any changing this is going to take a lot of time as well.

> solar is compatible not just with roofs and parking lots, but also with reservoirs and canals, where it cuts evaporation and operates more efficiently, and even with pasture and farmland, where it increases yield (by reducing heat stress) and cuts water demand (likewise). There is a lot of pasture and farm land. Ranchers and farmers like an extra revenue stream and better yield

Most of these scenarios will more than double the cost of a solar install compared to a utility solar farm and require heavy subsidies. I have seen the stories about mixing solar with farming in arid climates, and I am hopeful that can be adopted as a practice, but I think you are front-running what is just an experiment right now.

> Disposing of used solar panels is trivial: the metal gets recycled, the silicon gets recycled, the cadmium and the tellurium get recycled.

Do you have any evidence that this is actually being done at scale now? Who do I can call to remove my solar panels and recycle them? For example, this article says "In the United States, there are only a few businesses specializing in the recycling of solar panels, so most panels that are submitted for recycling are being warehoused until a solution is found for the U.S." [1]

[1] https://solarpowergenie.com/how-to-dispose-of-solar-panels-a...

Production of renewables has, in fact, increased by 10x several times over, and is still increasing as costs continue on down.

Storage will not be in batteries, so it doesn't matter what production rate of batteries is. Huge amounts of pumped hydro are being built out right now. Bulk storage will be in synthetic chemicals, principally anhydrous ammonia and hydrogen, which besides being storable, are both readily transportable and valuable as industrial feedstock.

> implies needing other sources of power for when the sun isn't shining in the wind is not blowing

The sun is always shining somewhere, and the wind is always blowing somewhere. So, you just need to be equipped to transport the energy from somewhere to here. That will probably be, most often, via high-voltage transmission line, but also via supertanker. Absent transmission lines, you only need to stockpile enough to hold out until a shipment arrives from the tropics.

Recycling solar panels is not being done at scale because very few panels have aged out, yet. There is, furthermore, a ready market for panels with degraded output. In any case, even if they were just piled up somewhere, that is no more a problem than doing the same thing with eroded wind turbine blades. There is plenty of room to park as much of them as you like. They don't even need a roof overhead.

When the CdTe panels finally age out, there will be a ready market for the scrap, because Cd and Te are valuable.

Building solar over pasture does not, in fact, substantially increase installation cost. But it does eliminate the need to buy land to use. Siting over cropland will be done more for the benefit of the crops, while providing revenue year-round.

But in any case there is absolutely no shortage of suitable land for solar, even without co-siting. So, farmers can take up solar or not, at their option. Many will, probably most won't.

Every scaling process reaches bottlenecks. Solar panels increased in price in 2021/2022 due to the rising costs of the raw materials and there's no quick fix to this fundamental issue.

I love your future Utopia. I just don't want to bet my future on all these new experiments coming together and working out perfectly. I think you are front-running every single energy source or technology mentioned. Even pumped hydro, which is a great and old technology- but it had it's first new project in the US approved in 30 years and it remains to be seen when it will actually be built because there are land use issues [1].

The war in Ukraine is creating a crisis of energy security. We need to ask ourselves whether we want to handle the intermittency of renewables by transporting energy all around the world with new experimental techniques or just build some nuclear plants in our own country and avoid all the geopolitics.

[1] https://www.energy-storage.news/new-pumped-hydro-around-the-...

Solar had a price blip because of COVID supply chain hiccups. There is no shortage of silicon, which constitutes 28% of the earth's crust.

The current problem for renewables is storage for times when solar/wind aren't producing. There's some promising work being done there, but nuclear power is existing tech that can fill that gap. The fastest path off carbon should have both renewable and nuclear investments working in paralll.

Too much NIMBY, too much irrational fear if it, so it's unlikely to happen in the US. The current Russian/Ukraine war makes me wonder if European countries might reconsider their stance on it. It's not too late, for plants scheduled to be shutdown 2+ years from now, to make plans to keep them online. It also gives them motivation to build new ones, which France announced it would do just this past February. Perhaps the biggest challenge for countries that haven't built one in a few decades is experienced engineers. The US for example may have people experienced with operating them, but probably not building them at scale. France's original Messmer Plan shows it's possibly to ramp up relatively quickly though.

Storage just needs to be built out. It takes time to build out.

But nowhere near as much time as it would take to build out nukes.

I'm not aware of good storage options that scale to that level. Lithium batteries might conceivably do it but we can barely make enough to supply the EV market And if the Chevy Bolt is any indicator, we need to be extremely careful when we build massive novel battery storage systems like this. The few sites I'm aware of that are trying this are still only, at maximum charge, able to supply 4-6 hours of power for their location, and they're the largest in the world.

If getting off carbon is an existential threat, there's no reason that nuclear shouldn't be part of the solution in getting us there faster.

Obviously batteries are not right for utility storage. Even mentioning batteries in this context means you are not seriously engaged. If you really think we don't have good storage options that scale, you just haven't been paying attention.

Building nukes does not get us there faster, because it takes many years to even start displacing fossil fuels, and then it costs so much you get only a small fraction of the power renewables would produce--provided it ends up producing any power at all, which they often do not.

Stop with the veiled ad hominem attacks and provide some information if you want to have a discussion. If you're aware of a currently deployable massive scale long-term storage mechanism, I'm fully open to changing my opinion. I understand your point about allocating resources to renewables vs splitting them between nuclear, but storage is the key to that. As for the time nuclear takes, that's a matter of will, just like renewables. We can do it faster if we have a will to do so. France went from 0 to about 70% nuclear in under a decade. We need to be able to guarantee a complete scalable storage solution before new nuclear could come online to discard nuclear. Not with speculative tech, but things we know can work and scale.

As for cost, who cares? It's an existential threat. Spend what we have to do get it done. If it takes a few $Trillion building nuclear to shutdown all the coal plants, great! Money well spent. The US has dispersed about $10Trillion due to COVID. Coincidentally, at $10Billion for a nuclear power plant @1000MW, that's about the amount of money it would take to build enough nuclear power to go 100% nuclear in the US. Horrible as COVID is, the next few decades of climate change will be worse in their human costs. If we had done that 5 years ago we'd be close to bringing that capacity online in the next 2-3 years.

Anyway, what's the storage option I'm missing here? Molten salt, compressed air, some variety of stored kinetic energy? I'm aware of a few, but none that are ready for prime time, and would be extremely happy to be wrong if I've overlooked something obvious.

Pumped hydro is being built out like gangbusters. Mostly on hilltops, so far. But deep underground works too, and combined with hilltop multiplies the energy stored per gallon of water.

My current favorite, demonstrated recently, is a spherical pressure vessel anchored to the ocean bottom. The deeper it is, the more power it stores. At the bottom of the tank a pump drives out the water, leaving water vapor. You let it back in for power. You only need a wire back to shore.

Synthesis of hydrogen and ammonia has a huge, crucial role because those can be shipped to where they are needed. Ammonia is easy to handle liquified at room temperature and low pressure. The low round-trip efficiency turns out not to matter much; you just add more panels to make up the difference. A GW ammonia plant is going up in Norway. We will need hundreds more, in the tropics. The local stockpile only needs to hold out until the next shipment arrives, just like for oil, except you only need it sometimes.

Anytime local tankage is full, you can sell further production, which is massively useful as industrial feedstock. Because each extra panel you install generates revenue, there is no penalty for building out massive overcapacity.

Hydrogen is easy to store underground, e.g. in places where natural gas was pumped out of.

A 100 MW liquified nitrogen plant is going up in Chile. Liquifying air is extremely mature tech, very efficient already.

Compressed air, as noted, is being tried. A big bag anchored to the sea bottom can have air pumped into it, and released for power. Disused mines and salt domes can hold compressed air, too. Compressing hydrogen into them stores two kinds of power at the same time.

The point about cost is that a dollar spent on any technology displaces a certain amount of fossil fuel per unit time. Spend it in the wrong place, and you displace less coal than if you had spent it in a better place. Nukes are so expensive that your dollar fails to displace much coal.

Please share your storage solutions because I've not seen any that work for more than a half hour or so at grid levels of power consumption. No current tech other than say hydro dams can work for an extended time and most geographies don't allow for that.

I have explained at length in other replies here. Read those.

Is storage a problem for a big country like the USA? If you have a connected grid, can’t you be reasonably sure it’s windy and sunny in some places and bring power from there?

I actually don’t know

Yes, wind is always blowing somewhere. Unless you are Texas, and can't bring yourself to tie to the rest of the grid.

A particularly good example is Germany, where they cannot get enough natural gas to meet their needs, and are burning coal like nobody's business.

Which follows their insane decision to shut down their nuclear plants.

Germany's need for natural gas to fire furnaces in people's houses would not be served by power from nuke plants.

But it would be if they were to switch to electric heat

I think it's the main tragedy of the human race is not staying with nuclear and going all in. Unfortunately the fad of being afraid of nuclear will probably be the downfall of the human race. We would have had energy solved by the 80's. Almost sickening to think about.

I don't know, early reactor designs were pretty unsafe and I'm not sure a lot more of them would have been better. Sometimes taking time to mature a technology, even one that's hugely beneficial in the long term, works better than just piling in quickly and risking finding that you invested in a developmental dead end. Having said that now nuclear does seem to be a mature technology with significant benefits.

The airborne reactor was our ticket to the future but it didn't produce plutonium.

>I don't know, early reactor designs were pretty unsafe and I'm not sure a lot more of them would have been better

There have been what, 5 events in the last 50 years that released a significant amount of radiation, only one catastrophic meltdown (Chernobyl), out of thousands of plants running continuously for decades? Seems pretty safe to me...

I agree the impact of and response to accidents is often exaggerated out of proportion. Except for Chernobyl. That one was a monster.

However if you take the long term impact and costs of those accidents and add them to the cost of nuclear power overall, it's not a pretty picture. I would not have supported significantly more nuclear 40 years ago, some but not massive. I do support it now though. We've learned a lot.

Chernobyl was hardly a monster. According to Wikipedia, 30 people died immediately, and probably another 30 due to the radiation aftermath. Maybe a few thousand more someday due to long term effects. Highest estimates are 60k deaths.

Chernobyl could have been so much worse, so much worse. You should look that up as well. We definitely do not want to do more Chernobyl style nuke plants. There are much much safer designs available.

So every 10 years a major accident.

How does that sound safe to you? We've been lucky that none of those was in densely populated areas somewhere in Europe for example.

Chernobyl was the only "major" accident, perhaps you could put Fukishima into that category, but again you're disregarding the denominator, thousands of plants operating for decades without issue. That sounds very safe to me, especially when weighted against emissions reduction.

Which one is supposed to work "without issue"?

Those who campaigned against it, ostensibly on behalf of the environment, irreversibly damaged the reputation of environmentalists by letting themselves be duped. Now people think that putting the atmosphere on the free market through CO2 scrubbers is a good idea, although the market's intelligence can never replicate what a billion years of genetic evolution has produced. We will suffocate ourselves in the race to the bottom.

I'd gladly wallow in the shame of global despot if it meant we could reverse this madness of irresponsibility. :p

Not really true, because electricity generation is only a fraction of energy usage. Most of our greenhouse gas emissions come from other sources like transportation, industrial processes, and agriculture, so there are actually a quite a wide range of technological problems that need to be solved beyond just deploying more nuclear.

Sure, but more solutions are feasible if power is cheap and plentiful.

But, we now how to convert most of those process to electric. The engineering challenges have been solved.

It is just not cost effective at the moment because you would have to update manufacturing process for all the things you want to change and that takes money. But with cheap electricity, oil/gas becoming more expensive and political incentives...

In the 1970s, the US had plans to build 1,000 nuclear power plants. If they were the average size, I believe would come to double our current electrical generation capacity. Where would we be with cheap, plentiful, carbon-neutral electricity?

"Electricity and heat" has been the dominant source of emissions in the US since at least 1990[0]. Even if most of that is the "heat" part, we can heat much more efficiency with electricity than with gas nearly the entire year in all our climates, and in the rare cases where that's not true, resistance heating can cover the offset. The only reason we use gas is because it was cheaper.

Second on the list is transportation, much of which is finally hitting viability for electrification right now. Again, if we'd had cheap, plentiful electricity, that would have spurred on development and implementation much earlier. Maybe not the 1980, but a decade or two sooner definitely seems believable.

There are likely some industrial processes that we can't easily switch over, but I think given a cost incentive, we'd find a way for most things.

I am kind of assuming the switchover would mean "cheap" electricity. Maybe we'd have plentiful expensive electricity, but I'd expect market forces to push the price down.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector#annual-greenh...

Heating and electric vehicles are in fact the perfect example of the phenomenon I’m describing.

Already today, it would be more efficient to heat your home with a heat pump powered by a natural gas generation station, than to burn that same gas for heat directly.

Already today, it’s more efficient to convert fossil fuel into electricity and charge an electric car, than to burn that fuel in the engine.

There are high barriers of technology, scalability, and economics to overcome to make this transition happen, and if we had built a lot more nuclear in the 80s and 90s those barriers would still be nearly as high.

But energy is still a major factor in climate change. Imagine if the US's energy production looked like France's[0]. Potentially this would have also affected total global emissions as other countries typically follow US technologically. But that is speculation. But either way it would have reduced the climate problem in a significant way, making our current path forward easier (though yeah, it wouldn't have avoided the catastrophe. But let's recognize that this is extremely multifaceted).

[0] https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/FR

The fad of being afraid of nuclear was not real issue as it was already pointed here - electricity generation is not only issue. But even if we are talking about electricity generation - there are countries that had loads of coal so they stayed with coal-fired power stations. Why there is no nuclear power plant in Poland? Because of people being afraid of nuclear? That seems bit naive.

What would it have meant to go all in? The reasons for not going all in, were certainly not because of the environmental movements.

Also if we extrapolate from the nuclear accidents that we had, with the current number of power plants we had a major incident every 20-30 years or so. If we would have wanted to supply all our power from nuclear it would have meant at least a tripling of reactors (more like 5 times or so, given the developing world), so given the rate of incidents we would have a major incident every 10 years at least. Considering that they tend to render large areas completely uninhabitable in 50 years significant areas on all continents would be uninhabitable.

The shame is that we haven't gone all in on renewables and storage much earlier.

We've had three major incidents that come to everyone's mind:

- Chernobyl, involving a reactor that didn't even have a containment dome, and in which the reaction rate sped up as the fuel got hotter. (The opposite is true of all modern reactors.)

- Fukushima, which failed due to a major earthquake and tsunami that killed thousands of people, while the radiation release didn't kill anyone. The exclusion zone there is only 20 square kilometers. And this was with a reactor design from the 1970s; a nearby plant ten years newer faced the same challenges and did fine.

- Three Mile Island, in which containment worked very well and radiation never went above background levels.

Aside from Chernobyl that seems like a pretty decent safety record to me. By comparison, nobody worries about hydropower, despite hydro having the worst accident of any power plant ever: Banqaio Dam, which killed 26,000 people immediately and another 150,000 or so in the aftermath.

The reason we didn't go all in on renewables earlier was that they were too expensive in the 20th century. Nuclear was not, as proven by France, which converted to 80% nuclear over the course of a couple decades.

3MI vented a huge amount of radioactive krypton gas, which is never, ever counted. That stuff runs downhill like fluffy water, and hugged the shores of the river all the way to the ocean.

From a quick google, the krypton was vented on purpose over the course of weeks, to keep radiation at safe levels. Government regulators were involved.

All of us are immersed in background radiation all the time. Raising the level slightly, but still within normal background levels, is not a significant safety concern. It's certainly far less concerning than climate change, or even the direct pollution from fossil plants.

The krypton gas release was treated as if it dissolved in the atmosphere, not (as happened) ran downhill and gassed neighborhoods along the river.

So yes three accidents in the last 60 years (I counted nuclear power to really start in the 1960s) that's an accident every 20 years like I wrote. Considering that chernobyl and fukushima rendered large areas of land uninhabitable I don't consider that a good track record. The lucky thing so far was that none of the incidents happened to a plant close to a large city. If a fukushima would have happened at Krümmel for example, Hamburg a city of 2M would have had to be evacuated.

Taking a simple average like that implicitly assumes that nuclear technology has not improved in sixty years, and that we've refused even to learn simple lessons like "put a containment dome around your reactor." This is manifestly not the case.

Until the local government cuts funding to the nuclear plant. Then maintenance goes undone, and eventually you're leaking radioactive waste into the local environment.

If you build a wind farm in the desert, and in 40 years it's abandoned, it's not really a big deal. I guess you're unlucky, one of the turbines might fall on someone, but you're not going to have dangerous nuclear waste to dispose of.

>How antiquated, you ask? In Washington, there is a pipe break every day. And according to EPA data, thousands of water and sewer systems across the country may be too old to function properly -- so old, in fact, that some were built during the Civil War.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/despite-civil-war-era-pipes-am...

Assume that anything you build today, may be abandoned in a few generations.

Nuclear weapons likely prevented >100M deaths in the last 50 years. Mutually Assured Destruction is the only reason we didn't have another hot world war since 1945.

If there were no nuclear weapons now, you'd have a full scale NATO/Russia war today and a US/China war in a few months.

Very ironically, Mahnattan Project heads should receive a few Nobel Peace prizes posthoumously.

After WW2 Europe learned its lesson: another war would destroy the entire region, even with conventional arms. But nuclear weapons did not prevent this war.

The manner which the weapons were used certainly precludes them from a peace prize IMO

I don't understand how you can think that logic would work in Europe, but didn't work in the many parts of the world that went on to have full on wars WW2 style. Vietnam, Iran/Iraq, Many Arab/Israeli conflicts, etc, etc. What's special about Europe that would have made it immune?

The answer is profuse nuclear weapons that made any direct conflict in Europe unthinkable for either side. Ukraine demonstrates clearly that when conventional war is thinkable, it only takes one side to feel they have the upper hand to make it happen. Nukes are the only reason Russian tanks aren't already dipping their treads in the sea along the coast of the Baltic States, or at least trying to.

Nuclear weapons aren't protecting baltic states, they are protecting Russia's imperial ambitions. It's army performanc is so abysmall european powers alone could steamroll all of it's offensibe force without US getting involved

If the recent conflict has shown us anything, is that Russian military is overhyped, complacent and corrupt, and performs terribly in confrontation with much smaller, poorly eqipped, and also somehwat corrupt military.

Russians have always had trouble with their offensives. But I doubt anyone thinks a pan european army can just roll into russia. The country is big. Supply lines breaks down. The winter is terrible. The russians are tough as hell and fierce when defending.

> But I doubt anyone thinks a pan european army can just roll into russia

Actually, that's quite easy as history demonstrates though you can indeed also easily become overstretched. One reason the Russians have stockpiled nuclear weapons is that they do not want this to happen again! They do like to act tough but they know that without nukes they are at a huge disadvantage against the West.

I mean their country is fading away fast. Instead of trying to fix it, they're trying to bring in new population, talent, and resources by trying to attack and absorb Ukraine.

Oh yeah U am not advocating invasion of Russia, the logistics and moral situation will totally flip.

Why do you think the conflicts in Asia, the middle-east etc. happened? Because the nuclear superpowers are fighting their wars there. One could very well argue that nuclear powers have created such an imbalance that the nuclear powers could act towards other powers like they did, because they knew the others would never directly intervene because of the danger of a nuclear war.

Did the fact they were nuclear powers have any effect on their sponsorship of foreign conflicts? I don't see how it's relevant, they'd have done it anyway. Also the nuclear powers often did intervene directly, as China and the USA did in Korea, and the USA did in Vietnam and Iraq, and Russia and later the USA did in Afghanistan.

The Korean war would not have happened if China had been a nuclear power with significant perceived military power.

In Europe, the threat of the USSR did bring the West together but quite apart from that the big powers, especially France and Germany decided very consciously that they could not go on having more and more destructive wars every generation or so (remember that for France and Germany WWII is actually no. 3 since the first was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870).

So this is a specific context in Europe and specific "paradigm shift" born from that specific context. Indeed, Europe 'learned' that they could not continue to slaughter each others and that led to the EU today (so not just fear of nuclear weapons but decision to bury the hatchet and cooperate on friendly terms instead).

I don't think that there is a similar history anywhere else in the world.

I suspect the existence of nuclear weapons and e.g. France having them actually had a significant impact on them forming that realisation.

Not really. France got its first nukes in 1960 and what had happened in both world wars was enough to change everyone's perception nukes or no nukes: The same would had happened if nukes had not even existed.

Nukes are a guarantee against invasion and in the context for France and the Cold War especially aimed against the USSR. But they don't mean you need to be friendly and cooperate. France and Germany (and others in Europe) really made a decision quite irrespective of the existence of nukes to stop European self-destruction and to work peacefully together from then on.

> After WW2 Europe learned its lesson...

From what I gather, there were no lessons learned in Europe. Huge majority of current European leaders seem to be itching to enhance the current conflict even with nuclear weapons being a thing.

We didn't evolve since WW2. I have no doubts that we're still as partisan, as greedy, as vengeful, as self-righteous as our predecessors of the 20th century.

The problem I see is that war is a very natural element of civilization that regularly relives population stress. It's been a part of human society likely before we even left the trees.

It's simply not natural to go for many generations without a significant culling of your male population.

I think it's not so much that humans haven't evolved since WWII, but that society hasn't evolved any kind of new pressure release valve.

This is often said, but the data shows it is false. Even WWII's millions had hardly any effect on the population curve.

>From what I gather, there were no lessons learned in Europe.

The 14 years - since Georgia 2008 - of trying to appease a tyrant is the best proof that no one learned anything from Chamberlain debacle.

At the cost of our ability to imagine a future, giving rise to the poverty called "postmodernism".

There is a whole world of thought surrounding the nuclear shadow that needs to be the context of any discussion on hypersonic weapons. ABM against those is automated warfare and the rise of the machines.

The situation on Earth is called Einstein's Prison, which is why antigravity is a matter of life or death for we who are stuck in this oubliette.

True, but has nothing to do with the article/tweet's topic?

Imagine if the US had developed them one year earlier. Would we have used them against Germany rather than lose 100k people in a land invasion? Would the indiscriminate use of nuclear weapons become the norm? There are worse nations and leaders throughout history who would have destroyed the world if they had the same tech. Of course I'm speaking from an American bias.

I should add that I personally find the use of nuclear weapons against Japan unnecessary and immoral.

The US probably would have done something similar a year earlier. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a tech demo for the benefit of the Russians. It was certainly immoral (and racist) but saved many more foreign lives than it cost.

As bad as Hitler was, the Russians killed orders of magnitude more civilians in that war, and were ready to launch into the rest of Europe after Berlin fell.

Unless they changed tactics, they would have run scorched earth campaigns in Western Europe, and Hitler's concentration camps would just be a footnote in most history texts.

Edit: Also, if you haven't seen it, watch Grave of the Fireflies. The US did far worse things to Japan than nuking it. There's a reason the Japanese surrendered well before the nukes.

??? Japan surrendered after the nukes.

People make crazy claims like this all the time lol. They didn't surrender before the nukes or the US government would have been ravaged in the history books. It would have taken a huge invasion force of the USA in order to take Japan and at least 10s of thousands dead on both sides, if not hundreds of thousands. The US would have bombed the entire country into rubble instead of two cities.

US had already made Dresden-scale firestorms in, what, 25 cities IIRC. Military command didn't care. Just blockading the country would have forced a full surrender, soon, as lack of fuel would shut down industry.

Ultimately, using the atomic bombs was an attention-getting device. The attention of Russia was as important as of the Japanese generals and emperor.

The Japanese surrendered before the nukes. The US claimed the message was lost in transit.

A decade or so ago, the relevant stuff was declassified. We got the message. The president decided to go forward with the nukes anyway. We had approximately 1.5 bombs, without more on the way, so it was a massive bluff. Knowing Japan would fold immediately after the bombings was a huge advantage.

Edit: the communications I'm referring to were via closed diplomatic channels. The public surrender announcement and face saving came later.

That is not true by any history I've read about it, and I've read a lot. It would been widely known. It's a conspiracy. Do you have proof of this or just some hearsay from "a high level source" ? Lots of people claim this stuff but never present solid evidence or documents that are verifiable.

During one of the recent declassifications, '05? '15?, reputable national US news networks said the new documents proved the US knew Japan was attempting to surrender before the bomb was dropped.

This page is at an .edu, and is more ambiguous on the issue, saying it is an open question, and as of 2020 still being debated.

It seems to link to databases of primary sources:

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2020-0...

This very interesting! Pointing to a reliable source would be most welcome.

The overwhelming majority of things that happened are not widely known. That is necessarily how reality is.

People in general do not understand how nuclear strategy works. Almost everyone just goes "nuclear weapons bad remove them pls" (especially in Germany). The ignorance and misunderstanding is almost comical.

Perhaps you might want to read Command and Control, a book about the terrifying history of near misses in terms of nuclear weapons. It may well be true that nuclear weapons have reduced hot wars. But it can be equally true that had a few small things gone a different way, the world could have been subjected to an even more horrible nuclear war. And this is still very much the situation.

https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Ill...

Also worth reading: Daniel Ellsberg's book The Doomsday Machine.

Ellsberg's job was nuclear strategy, and most of the classified documents he snuck out of his office were related to that. He published the Pentagon Papers first because he felt that if he started with the nuclear papers, nobody would even care about the Vietnam stuff.

He gave the nuclear papers to his brother, who hid them in a garbage bag on the edge of the town dump. Then a storm washed away that whole corner of the dump. They spent a year trying to find them and finally gave up. Ellsberg wrote that his wife considered that a miracle from God, because he got a pass on the Vietnam leak but would have certainly spent the rest of his life in prison for the rest.

Until recently he didn't talk about this stuff because he couldn't substantiate it, but now, enough has been declassified that he could back up his claims, which are horrific. US nuclear strategy in the '50s and '60s included the destruction of every city over 25K people in Russia and China in response to surprisingly minor conventional provocation, and acceptance of the death by radiation of everyone in Europe.

An especially startling point was that the authority to launch nukes was not just at the top. Theater commanders could do it on their own. According to Ellsberg that is still the case today.

You mean it has prevented a hot war between the US and Russia, instead we had lots of substitute wars were mostly only brown people died (sarcasm!). Essentially nuclear weapons meant that all nuclear powers could act with impunity toward non-nuclear powers who were not directly aligned with any of the blocks. I mean Ukraine is like a prime exhibition, Putin would have likely never invaded if he didn't have nuclear weapons, and the west would have likely reacted much earlier.

The arguments are definitely not as straight-forward.

I think it's kind of a reach to say that nuclear weapons saving lives through the deterrence of MAD can also be included in nuclear power saving lives. I think they can be relatively distinct.

For example there have been many instances where countries have specifically stopped at nuclear power, but not begin research or further refinement into creating nuclear weapons (because of possible sanctions, international backlash, etc). IIRC there are roughly 20ish countries that have nuclear power, but no nuclear weapons.

Mutually assured destruction is analogue to the martingale betting strategy. You can raise your chances of winning a small amount as close to 100% as you can afford by just risking everything if you lose.

Nuclear energy is also the best way to perform nuclear de-proliferation and has been by far the most successful means to date.[0]

> A total of 500 tonnes of Russian warhead grade HEU (equivalent to 20,008 nuclear warheads) were converted in Russia to nearly 15,000 tonnes tons of LEU (low enriched uranium) and sold to the US for use as fuel in American nuclear power plants. The program was the largest and most successful nuclear non-proliferation program to date.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program

You might be asking the wrong question. An equally valid question would be: If Russia didn’t have nukes, would it have so haphazardly invaded Ukraine?

In fact we have a comparative case study. In 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Iraq at the time didn’t have nukes. The USA and other responded by promptly invading Iraq.

Now with this history in mind. Why wouldn’t NATO respond to Russian hostilities by sending their military to protect Ukrainian sovereignty if Russia didn’t have nukes. And with that in mind would Russia have engaged in this horror if it was sure of its futility. All this horrors could have been prevented if we had eliminated these weapons of terror while we had a chance.

NOTE: My main point with this exercise is to provide an alternate hypothetical situation which leads to the opposite results. This is to prove a point that you cannot for certain speculate that MAD has saved lives. An equally valid hypothetical can speculate that MAD actually costs lives.

It's frightening to see how the nuclear power debate is done nowadays.

Yes, nuclear energy is generating less CO2 than some other forms of energy, but saying it's saving lives seems sketchy at best, and to be used as a "hammer argument". Because it's "saving lives", it's good.

All energy producing less CO2 than the current mix is "saving lives" in a way. So yes, we should aim for less production of CO2. There is no question here.

But I believe that in order to have a opinion on the matter we need to understand the whole picture.

- *Waste* : we don't really know what to do with them. We pile them up and try to protect humans from them, but really we don't know what to do more than that.

- *War risk* : if a plant is a military target, it might cause big trouble to the population around, and to the nature…

- *Dismantling* : we still don't know how to dismantle a nuclear power plant and we don't know the energetic cost of doing so. Still, we have many nuclear plants that are coming to their end of lives, and we still don't know how to so properly.

- *We don't have sufficient sources of uranium* : it seems that we lack some uranium in order to produce enough energy in a sustainable way.

- Also, uranium extraction is complex geo-politically and seems to creates a geographic context keen to a war on resources, especially if we don't have enough.

So, it might "save lives" wrt CO2 emissions, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a clean energy, nor that's the energy of the future, in my opinion.

I don't think it's lower CO2 emissions that saves lives. It's likely reduced air pollution.

Gas power plants probably have similar properties. (Not that I would advocate for gas)

In any case, most the problems around nuclear are lack of political will and economies of scale.

> Waste : we don't really know what to do with them. We pile them up and try to protect humans from them, but really we don't know what to do more than that.

We know exactly what to do with it: bury it underground, in bedrock, like what Finland is doing [1]. For countries like the USA that don't reprocess nuclear waste, it represents a future source of fuel so burying it is wasteful. There's also an incredibly small amount of waste: all nuclear waste from electricity generation in the USA fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high [2].

> War risk : if a plant is a military target, it might cause big trouble to the population around, and to the nature…

The risk posed by nuclear power plants in wartime is drastically lower than the actual war itself. The vulnerability of power plants are also overstated: reactors are essentially inside of bunkers, protected by meters of reinforced concrete. The Ukraine war has demonstrated the resilience of nuclear plants: none have been breached.

> We don't have sufficient sources of uranium : it seems that we lack some uranium in order to produce enough energy in a sustainable way.

Existing terrestrial reserves are more than enough for centuries, or longer with reprocessing. Uranium seawater extraction affords an effectively unlimited supply [3].

Nuclear power represents the only non-intermittent source of carbon-free energy besides geographically limited sources like geothermal or hydroelectric power. For that reason, it's going to be the backbone of most countries' decarbonization efforts unless a massive breakthrough in storage is made.

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

2. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

The fact that your solution for long-term storage isn't even operational yet renders the confidence in your line of arguments ad absurdum. The fact that you try to defuse the GPs concerns with short-sentenced bullet points says it all - you're dismissive and strongly opinionated, while the concerned are asking very valid questions. That's bad intellectual culture, to say the least.

Finland has operated the VLJ repository in Olkiluoto since the 1990s [1]. The linked facility is an additional one being constructed (also in Olkiluoto) to accommodate future waste.

There's also a site in Korea that's operational: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolseong_Low_and_Intermediat...

These examples are easily obtained via Google: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository

The risks posed by nuclear waste is vastly overstated. A little known fact: the USSR and the United Kingdom dumped most of their nuclear waste into the ocean until the 1990s [2]. There were no adverse affects observed due to this dumping. Yet we're worried about waste buried in bedrock?

1. https://www.tvo.fi/en/index/production/nuclearwastemanagemen...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactiv...

No one has ever extracted uranium from seawater. Why not? Because it costs a lot more. But nukes are already not economically competitive. Making the fuel cost more makes them even less attractive.

From the linked article:

> Fortunately, the cost of uranium is a small percentage of the cost of nuclear fuel, which is itself a small percentage of the cost of nuclear power. Over the last twenty years, uranium spot prices have varied between $10 and $120/lb of U3O8, mainly from changes in the availability of weapons-grade uranium to blend down to make reactor fuel.

> So as the cost of extracting U from seawater falls to below $100/lb, it will become a commercially viable alternative to mining new uranium ore. But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.

And yes, demonstrations of seawater extraction have been done. Again, this is covered in the article.

Nuclear power has a lot of connections to the nuclear arms industry, and as such is highly secretive. Many nuclear reactors were in fact to make bomb fissile material, with power generation as a side effect. The disposal problem is often covered in a veil of secrecy, eg when it pertains to weapons.

This is why debating these issues, which I've looked at my whole life, can be troublesome. We just don't have all the facts!

https://cnduk.org/resources/links-nuclear-power-nuclear-weap...

The VAST majority of reactors ever built were not built to generate fissile material for weapons, and the VAST majority of nuclear weapons were built using centrifuge facilities which are cheaper to build and simpler in some respects to operate. Reactors have in fact been used to dispose of material from weapons. Civilian disposal plans in the west are all a matter of public record and there have been reams of paper generated about the topic.

Yes, the weapons part is to some extent secretive, but the UNODA oversees disarmament so there is some multinational transparency.

Keeping a nuclear industry around is still a good way to keep a lid on nuclear arsenal costs. There are supply chain efficiencies, a pipeline of necessary skills, etc.

It's just a ridiculously expensive way to generate green energy.

When Iran builds nuclear reactors for "100% peaceful non military purposes" suddenly the western media can see through the ruse and understands all this.

> Keeping a nuclear industry around is still a good way to keep a lid on nuclear arsenal costs.

No it isn't. We aren't really building new weapons, we're just maintaining the ones we have. There shouldn't be any unique supply chain overlap. There's also transparently budget under DOD in the US for maintaining the nuclear arsenal. The CBO publishes the numbers, $643 billion over the next 10 years [1]. As for the skills, the military just trains people. A large number of civilian operators were trained by the military, not the other way around.

Iran is building centrifuges which it claims are for medical isotopes and later some reactors or scientific purposes. They've allowed in inspectors at various points and the western press generally, but cautiously accepts this as the truth. The problem is that they have the ability to enrich further to bomb grade material. The whole original deal was about getting them to give up enrichment and accept material at enrichment level sufficient for energy and medicine from France. That fell apart and they are enriching material again themselves.

> It's just a ridiculously expensive way to generate green energy.

If coal were regulated like nuclear energy it would be far more expensive due to fuel costs. If you had to dispose of lithium such that it couldn't leak for more than 10k years batteries would be far more expensive. If we didn't changes the regulations every few years and appoint anti-nuclear activists to run the NRC, it would be much cheaper. But yes, nuclear is expensive. It's also incredibly safe, 0 carbon, and produces no air pollution. It also provides base load energy which other 0 carbon sources can't do yet.

You're just spreading FUD.

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57240#:~:text=If%20carried%2....

Coal is on its way out, so there is absolutely no point in comparing to coal, going forward. The only sensible cost comparisons to make today are with natural gas and renewables; and tomorrow renewables only.

>No it isn't. We aren't really building new weapons, we're just maintaining the ones we have... $643 billion over the next 10 years

It's the opinion of the (pro nuclear) ex energy secretary Ernest J Moniz: https://web.archive.org/web/20180630220957/https://static1.s...

>$643 billion over the next 10 years

You do see how that isn't exactly cheap, right? And how it would be a problem if it ballooned over a trillion or more?

>If coal were regulated like nuclear energy

The fact you're comparing nuclear to the fastest disappearing form of unprofitable dirty energy kind of says it all, really.

> It's the opinion of the (pro nuclear) ex energy secretary Ernest J Moniz

He's talking about carbon emissions and non-proliferation goals which involves decommissioning weapons. There's 1 paragraph in the whole 38 page document about needing a reactor to produce tritium domestically to keep weapons functional until universal disarmament. You don't need anything more than a research reactor for that, and the DOD could probably just build one if they wanted to.

Trying to connect civilian nuclear to weapons is FUD.

> You do see how that isn't exactly cheap, right?

I literally never commented on that. I was refuting your claim that it was a hidden, which it demonstrably is not. You completely made up that "Keeping a nuclear industry around is still a good way to keep a lid on nuclear arsenal costs." That is provably false, as demonstrated by the CBO publishing the costs.

> The fact you're comparing nuclear to the fastest disappearing form of unprofitable dirty energy kind of says it all, really.

You could say the same thing about natural gas, nickel mining, lithium mining, and on and on. Nuclear mine tailings are mitigated to the point that they are less radioactive than the background levels of the areas in which they are found. If dams had the kind of regulator scrutiny that nuclear receives, none would ever be built especially near centers of population.

What is the actual claim here? Nuclear power didn't prevent any deaths, after all everyone will eventually die for one reason or another. So it must be something like two million people would have died earlier without nuclear power, but by how much? Does it mean nuclear power saved the equivalent of two million average lifespans? Or would two million people more have died in coal mines?

Obviously when something is said to have "prevented deaths" this means early deaths from accidents/illness...

Here, as is explained is the tweet, the claim is based on the reduction in air pollution.

Without further details that is not really helpful. If everyone died one week earlier because of additional air pollution, would that mean nuclear power saved everyone's life? And it certainly makes a difference whether the average loss of lifetime is a week or ten years.

A more interesting metric would maybe be years of life expectancy, but that's probably too much of a hassle to calculate for a metric which is relatively speaking useless

> the claim is based on the reduction in air pollution.

That has been heavily improved in the last years by a better car design, better materials, motor burning regulated by electronics and a much more strict regulation in vehicle emissions.

Thus nuclear would be bragging here about other's merits.

Using the same argument we could claim also that combustible fossils had saved millions of lives in the last years because cars now have much more plastic parts than before (reduced weight -> less mass to move -> less fuel spent to move it -> less air pollution).

Well, he claims that these lives "would have been lost due to air pollution". The question is, what was the alternative considered for this study? Probably the worst kind of coal plant they could imagine, without any kind of filtration technology? Because I'm pretty sure that the number of lives lost in the last 50 years due to pollution from coal power plants in, let's say, Germany (Ok, West Germany before 1990) is pretty close to zero.

Ok, there are of course other countries with less strict regulations, but then the question is this: would a country that is not capable to regulate its coal plant operators so that they don't kill people via pollution be capable to regulate its nuclear plant operators so that they operate their plants safely?

The problem is that »[...] lives that would have been lost due to air pollution.« makes no sense. The closest meaningful literal interpretation would be, that the additional air pollution would have effect no one except two million people and those would have died earlier than without the additional air pollution. But that still doesn't tell much unless you specify how much earlier they would have died.

In reality additional air pollution, on average, shortens everyone's life expectancy by a certain amount and that is a meaningful measure. So maybe the claim is supposed to mean that nuclear power saved about two million times the average life expectancy during the last 50 years which is very roughly one week for everyone. But it is not even clear if the number is supposed to be a global number or for a more specific area.

"after all everyone will eventually die for one reason or another."

Well then we should let killers out of prison.

That's the point, whether the killers are in prison or free, everyone will die. But with the killers in freedom, people will have a decreased life expectancy and that decrease - simply on average or also taking into account the distribution - is a meaningful way to measure the impact.

But that analogy is not really good, in case of the killers you can pretty much quantify how many people died because of them and therefore you could say not releasing the killers saved two million lives. [1] In case of some additional air pollution you are not able to say who died because of it, you can only observe a change in life expectancy.

[1] But even that is only meaningful to a certain extend - if all the killers decided to only kill people seconds before they died from another reason, that two million lives saved really means two million times ten seconds saved.

It baffles me how it's completely normal to avoid any mention of nuclear power when discussing climate change.

Kurzgesagt just did a great video[1] on what we should be hopeful for addressing climate change, but again, absolutely zero mention of nuclear power.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxgMdjyw8uw

Me as well. I almost never hear nuclear advocates poo poo power from solar and wind, all are welcome, but coming from the other side they completely overlook the fact that nuclear power has been working fine for decades, is a 90% fix for climate change and yet they still lose their minds when you bring it up.

Such statements like "measure x prevented/caused n deaths" should generally be considered highly dubious unless applied to a very narrow context (such as a randomized double blind placebo control study, etc.).

There is nothing that can really prevent death; everyone will die sooner or later. So speaking of "preventing/causing death" is an abbreviated way of speaking. It makes most sense when it is about "immediate death", but the longer it takes for a cause to develop its presumed effect, the less the effect can be solely attributed to this particular cause. It then makes no real sense to just count the numbers of deaths related to a particular cause, if it is only one of an actually unquantifiable number of contributory causes.

But analysing the structure of the statement closer, it becomes even more dubious, because (after applying some small interpretative clarifications) it follows the basic structure: "measure x prevented n of d, because it has an effect e that is (indirectly!)[1] somehow correlated with d". To evaluate the extent to which such a claim could probably be valid would require a considerable amount of background information. Just presenting it as a statement without any substantial discussion is not enlighting at all, but just polarizes the audience: if the statement fits into someone's already established belief system it is readily accepted at truth, and if it contradicts someone's belief system it is instantly rejected. There is no chance to learn anything from it.

[1] In the case of hypercapnia, CO2 can directly affect health, but I do not think that was the point of the statement.

This type of logic also justifies the nuclear bomb, as development of the nuclear bomb is an inevitable parallel to nuclear power.

Not against nuclear power, but as unwise as it is to ignore data, it's also unwise to blindly trust it without addressing non-quantifiable aspects of it. No other power source can do what it did to Chernobyl.

Are we really saying 4 or 5 Chernobyl level melt downs are ok every decade or so because the overall lives saved are greater? Hard to say, and also hard to say whether new technology can adequately reduce the risk of nuclear power.

My stance is that although we must move forward with nuclear if fusion doesn't pan out, we should nevertheless proceed with the utmost caution. I feel the attitude for nuclear power on HN is a little too enthusiastic. Tons of people are all in because of some statistical metrics.

Just keep in mind that numerical metrics are an accurate viewpoint, but they are just one angle out of multitudes of metrics, many of which cannot be quantified.

As others have pointed out, what does this even mean? What kind of metric is this? What was it compared against? Where is the data? It doesn't exactly instill confidence that the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes claims like these, this is marketing fluff.

Since an argument about Chernobyl inevitably comes up when nuclear power is discussed I thought it would be interesting to ask: what would the coal/natural gas power equivalent of Chernobyl be? That is, an accident which caused significant death or ecological contamination.

The closest I can think of for a "coal Chernobyl" would be something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...

ASK HN: does anyone familiar with the matter have access to robust predictive models wrt the impact on health of the expected problems with long-term storage of nuclear waste?

For the german/french speaking part of the audience, ARTE recently uploaded an insightful documentation on the state of nuclear facilities in France (which I found very sobering, to say the least): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gXrL4tPMoM -- while that is surely not ARTEs best piece and you get an idea of the redactions opinion through editorialization, it's definitely a recommended watch. The link points to the german version.

Bottom lines:

- nuclear power is not as transparent about the existing impact on the environment as one would think. for example, rivers even in the middle of europe are regularly contaminated with "negligible" contaminants, where what is defined as "negligible" is _not only intransparent, but not publicly known and censored in cases of information-requests, with the given reason being raison d'être of the state (!)_

- the storage-situation is not only not robust (not a single long term storage concept actually proved viable, globally), but much worse than I'd have anticipated

[...] those are the points that immediately come to mind.

My point here is: yes, great, we need to reduce the burden on the environment as much as possible, and _if_ nuclear is the way to go, then please, let's do that. But the unwillingness and lack of competence with regards to the long-term potentials for problems will bite us, and it will do so in more than one way, and I'm very concerned because of it. If the situation in central europe is as questionable as ARTE illuminates, I'm not sure I want to know how bad it is in regions with less political transparency. Hence the initial questions, primarily: who has access to such models?

2 million is a very low ball estimate in my opinion. If it weren’t for nukes there would have been at least one more world war between WW2 and now.

Great. Now lets talk about the ~7M of people that had received or still have to receive economical support and help to mitigate the effects of Chernobyl on their health and properties.

wonder how many millions died from cancer from radiation from all the nuclear/atomic weapon tests, and the 2 major nuclear power plant disasters (that we know of)

curious if its still a numerical net win or a lose when you take that side into account

Why would you bundle nuclear weapons tests together with civil applications?

The largest credible estimates for Chernobyl are in the hundreds or in the single-digit thousands. Estimates larger than that make significant methodological errors, like failing to account for better technologies for diagnosing certain types of cancer (especially thyroid cancer).

For Fukushima, most estimates predict zero deaths due to radiation exposure besides the plant workers.

It rounds down to 0, counting Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As always numbers as that are quite fuzzy. To estimate the risk, I like to look at physical modifications of our environment that _may_ prove dangerous, until we can prove their'e not. And if we look at the matter our earth and atmosphere is composed of, nuclear energy will likely do a much more distinct impact in the long term than any other man-made energy production efforts so far. While we are just causing turmoil in the carbon and mineral dust distribution of our planet, this is also done by animals and plants in the long term and by vulcans in the short term. But messing with the isotope and elemental composition is quite unique and happens far slower on a natural pace, and in other bodies like stars of course.

So tl;dr: We modify our planet in a _maybe_ destructive way for hundred thousands of years to come, by nuclear power generation. We don't know for sure if and how risky it is, but on other things (think of terrorism) we are taking vast efforts to keep risk at pace. So we should do with the elemental and isotope composition of our environment - by nuclear power!

> And if we look at the matter our earth and atmosphere is composed of, nuclear energy will likely do a much more distinct impact in the long term than any other man-made energy production efforts so far.

Citation is very much needed. Comparing nuclear energy with the dirty business of the fossil fuel chain is a no-brainer in my mind. Nuclear energy isn't perfect, but it's a lot more contained than fossil fuels.

> Comparing nuclear energy with the dirty business of the fossil fuel chain is a no-brainer in my mind.

This may hold if, as most of those studies do, compare the almost-certain effects that are almost-now. They fail -like any study- on vague and long term effects. Eg. who will condense health effects of radiation spread by fighting in chernobyl ruins into a reasonable paper any time soon?

So we cannot reliable know the impact of nuclear waste, that if not treated again, will be nuclear waste for 100.000 of years for some kinds of waste and this is for sure.

For fossils, we in fact can not precisely know the if reducing CO2 emissions again, if climate effects will vane in time. But we have some expectations on the intertia this system has. Still not knowing precisely trigger effects that may start processes going thousands of years (melting ice etc.) And we can expect most dust and toxic effects to stop within years, if those operations are stopped. Nature will close the holes we digged in 10s of years.

For windmills, solar panels and batteries we can be sure it's impact is not far away from it's dirty production, maintenance and recycling impact. Again, of course, one day may prove we're going to far and all wind has been stopped by windmills...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

There was 1 confirmed radiation death at Fukushima and more people died from the evacuation than the accident. The exposure to radiation in the exclusion zone was very low, probably too low to cause any excess cancer in the generally elderly population there.

Well, there were no deaths because of the contamination in the contaminated area, because the contaminated area was evacuated. D'uh...

People weren't evacuated immediately, which is the whole point. Your dismissiveness shows that you aren't very familiar with the particulars of the accident. There was a projection at the time that there would be a short term spike in thyroid cancer among that population, which hasn't materialized. In fact radiation levels are so low in the area that the wisdom of the evacuation is very much up for debate. Of people evacuated 98% were exposed to no more than a 5 mSv/yr dose. The current ambient dose rate is 3 mSv/yr in the area which is slightly less than you'd receive visiting Finland. Flying from NY to Fukushima would expose you to a 9 mSv/yr dose.

By 2018 more than 3700 people have died in relation to the evacuation (there's a technical criterion for this, basically death materially brought on by the worsened living conditions or issues during evacuation). IIRC there are no increased cancer rates among the population. The majority of evacuated people have not returned to their homes. The social and mental health impact of the evacuation was and is massive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

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