Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

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> That's a bit disingenuous. Those units were brought online in 1985 and 1986 and are licensed to operate through 2025. That's forty years - which is the life span of a power plant, especially a nuclear power plant. So, they're not being "switched off", they've hit end-of-life.

I doubt that is true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#2021... talks about a report that states "that keeping Diablo operating until 2045 would save the state a cumulative $21 billion," and I doubt they'd make a projection like that if the plant would be worn out in 2025.

It's probably not end of life, it probably just needs maintenance and recertification. This nuclear plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_Point_Nuclear_Generatin...) has some reactors that were built earlier, and are apparently now licensed to operate for a total of 80 years.

> Building a new nuclear power station is logistically impossible. Without getting into it, in essence the U.S. has lost the ability to construct nuclear power stations. People cite the regulatory nightmare, but that's not the real issue - that's an excuse. The real issue is much more complicated.

You make this claim, but you don't really support it. Why is this a "lack of ability" rather than a lack of political will?

I think people confuse the lifetime of the plant with the lifetime of the license to operate it. The NRC issues a 40 year license which can then be renewed if approved.

We have come to understand quite a lot better how long it is safe to operate nuclear plants. And less than 40 years is not that old yet for one. Clearly possible not to be at end of lifespan.

> Why is this a "lack of ability" rather than a lack of political will?

Even in countries that are massively pushing for nuclear energy and where the utilities are sometimes outright government-owned, like in France, Finland or the UK, nuclear reactor projects have continuously hit massive cost and deadline overruns: Finland's Olkiluoto 3 had 12 years delay and ended up costing over three times as expected, French Flamanville will end up at over six times the estimated budget and at least eight years delay, and UK's Hinkley Point can't even be reliably estimated.

The only ones being able to build out plants is China, and for what it's worth I think they will manage to blow up at least one of them due to shoddy construction.

150 plants in 15 years. There will definitely be at least one meltdown.

>China’s Climate Goals Hinge on a $440 Billion Nuclear Buildout

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...

I’m suspicious of the appropriateness of the even in this phrase. Massive bureaucracies with no competition produce late, cost-ineffective megaprojects, and a nuclear reactor is essentially megaproject bait even if does not actually have to built as one (unlike, say, a hydroelectric station). I’m reminded of how Higgs physics on the LHC is done on two completely independent detectors, ATLAS and CMS, because only building one would have ended up more expensive.

The problem at the root cause is the public's (reasonable!) expectations about safety. Humanity has experienced twice just how much damage a nuclear reactor blowing up can cause, not to mention how brittle they are and how lax people treat safety - just look at how many accidents happened at Sellafield - or the terrorism risk. Many of the experimental design ideas add the question of nuclear weapons proliferation on top.

Accounting for all these risks takes up serious amounts of money, enough to make the construction of a new plant so expensive it literally cannot ever turn a profit against incredibly cheap solar energy and ever-cheaper battery or molten-salt storage.

One might even say that nuclear energy was never profitable because the only way it appeared to be cheap was that the general public took up an extremely risky bet that the reactors would not go boom and because the costs for teardown and storage were never really accounted for.

The other problem is the public's unreasonable expectations about safety. Given the amount of radiation already emitted into the atmosphere by fossil fuels, a nuclear power plant meltdown cannot be considered to be a remarkable addition to that balance.

Except humanity has a very incomplete picture here that suffers cognitive biases. Coal outputs way more cumulative radiation than nuclear, amongst all kinds of other issues, but it’s slow and a little bit at a time so people don’t go up in arms. One or two booms gets all the attention.

There is nothing reasonable about the public expectation of safety when it comes to nuclear energy.

Coal plants cause orders of magnitude more premature deaths, but since they happen in hospitals and cancer treatment centers rather than homes, nobody cares. You can't make a 'Chernobyl' miniseries about cancer and emphysema patients scattered over an entire country (or planet.)

> Humanity has experienced twice just how much damage a nuclear reactor blowing up can cause

We haven't, really. We were quite lucky.

What if the Chernobyl disaster had reached the Pripyat river, and in turn contaminated the Dnieper? We are all familiar with them geography of Ukraine now.

What if a radioactive cloud from Fukushima had reached Tokyo?

What would have been the cost of a temporary evacuation of Tokyo?

I mean.. in both cases you would have to wait for the radiation to dissipate. Have people remain indoors and wait a few days for the cloud to pass. In the case of contamination of a water source, you would want to filter the water before drinking until the radioactive fallout burns itself out. Plus water is exceptionally good at stopping radiation so a nuclear accident into a body of water is like the best case scenario.

Nuclear radiation isn’t a boogeyman, and isn’t the most dangerous type of contamination by a long shot. I would be way more worried about a chemical spill or a industrial accident that released toxic gas.

What you described is not the lack of ability, it's the lack of political will.

It is remarkable that the UK does not trust Chinese involvement with our 5g network but we will let them design and build nuclear power stations here.

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