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Comment by mananaysiempre | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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