Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by DrBazza | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

DrBazza

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.

View on HN

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

but feels says nuclear bad...

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com