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I'm always a bit baffled by the amount of pro-nuclear comments on HN and their stance on how everyone who disagrees is just not educated enough. Please educate me: Is the waste problem solved? Are we not still fighting with all the previous attempts of handling it? Is "dig a hole in a salt deposit and keep it there" really good enough for the very, very, very long term? Are old powerplants properly decommissioned and replaced with new ones when the time comes? Can we really claim to be able to handle worst case scenarios well (e.g. Fukushima)?

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> Is the waste problem solved?

It has never been a problem in the first place. At least not a technical problem. Sure, it is nasty stuff, to be treated with respect, but not worse than toxic chemicals we regularly deal with. It is also potentially useful stuff: rare, exotic matter that gives off energy. Compare with coal plants that also produce nuclear waste (there are radioisotopes in coal), but that waste is dumped in the air you breathe.

> Are old powerplants properly decommissioned and replaced with new ones when the time comes?

The are properly decommissioned, and it is really expensive, and that's indeed a real problem with nuclear power: it is expensive. But the thing is: nuclear plants don't have an expiration date like bottles of milk, you could potentially run them forever with regular maintenance. The reason we don't do that is that is that over time, maintenance becomes more and more expensive, parts become obsolete and stop being produced, etc... At some point it is cheaper to build a new, better plant and decommission the old one instead of spending a fortune on obsolete parts and retrofitting.

> Can we really claim to be able to handle worst case scenarios well (e.g. Fukushima)?

No, they wouldn't be worst case scenarios if we could, but we are doing our best. In the end, even with Chernobyl, nuclear power is still one of the safest per unit of energy produced. It is no excuse, Fukushima shouldn't have happened, but if the only response to an accident was to stop everything, we wouldn't do much.

"In the end, even with Chernobyl, nuclear power is still one of the safest per unit of energy produced."

I'm not anti-nuclear at all, but I see this argument used a lot and I don't think it's a good one. The concerns with nuclear are all about tail risk. Comparing past results to other forms of energy doesn't address this since neither Chernobyl nor Fukushima were worst case scenarios for nuclear.

An effective pro-nuclear argument should address the tail risk concern head-on rather than talking past it.

Isn’t this like comparing the safety of a motorcycle to that of an A380? The “tail risk” of the latter is 800+ dead versus a single rider, but the expected value is way lower in the plane’s case.

In that case, there's plenty of data that shows the plane is safer mile-for-mile. There have been enough flights (of all jet models, not just the A380) and enough crashes to provide a reasonable estimate for the odds of a crash. From there, it's basic math to prove that the motorcycle is far more dangerous.

The challenge with nuclear energy is we don't have a big enough sample to say with certainty, just from the data, what the odds are of a disaster 1000x worse than Chernobyl.

My understanding is Chernobyl itself could have been 1000x worse and rendered much of Eastern Europe uninhabitable if the appropriate steps weren't taken in time, so to a neutral, non-expert observer, that would seem to indicate the odds are greater than zero.

This is what many anti-nuclear people are concerned about, so if you want to get them on your side, you need to explain in detail why that kind of event is no longer possible. Just stating that it hasn't happened, as if that were proof it can't happen, isn't convincing.

I see what you’re saying, but it seems impossible to prove it literally cannot happen if you just assume every safety system we put in place all fail at once, which is _possible_ I guess.

We live with worse tail risks daily though: we have nuclear weapons in the center of Europe (could be misused, there could be an accident, etc.), we have labs that handle or create deadly pathogens (there could be a leak, etc.), we live near volcanoes or in earthquake/tsunami prone areas, and of course we are living through climate change with unknown tail risk (to crops, to temperatures, etc.).

If you accept that sort of question with no real probability of happening (“what if 5G renders us all infertile because we misunderstand high frequency radio waves?”, “what if the flu vaccine produced this year kills us all?”), you can’t really do anything. It’s impossible to prove a negative, we have to deal with expected values given our knowledge.

That’s a very fair argument.

One consideration that comes to mind is if the scale necessary for operating nuclear is much greater than the examples you cited?

Thinking out loud, without taking a stance on either side, it seems we would need to scale nuclear power to the hands of many lesser qualified people than in the cases you mentioned, which would push the tail risk much harder.

That said, I haven’t thought deeply about the comparison here. If we need heavy magnitude of power, then we are bound to have to accept the risk of disaster as such concentrated power centers inevitably become unstable.

Scaling nuclear to power the world would also likely require extensive use of breeder reactors.

There clearly is a line where we don't do projects if the tail risk is too high, just like you wouldn't build a house next to a volcano that is known to violently erupt every year or decade--if it's every 1,000 years, it may be a different story. The question is which side of the line nuclear energy is on.

I basically agree that it's on the "worth doing" side given the right conditions are met. These conditions plainly weren't present in the USSR in the Chernobyl days, and probably aren't present everywhere nuclear plants are operating today either, but that's not a reason for a blanket anti-nuclear stance given its many benefits.

My point is simply that comparing historical results isn't relevant to the tail risk discussion. Pro-nuclear people should stop using this argument imo--it makes it seem as though they don't understand the position they're arguing against.

Sidenote on nuclear weapons: my sense is almost everyone does agree that the tail risk of a disaster is unacceptably high, but because game theory makes a drawdown extremely difficult, they're considered a grim necessity. If we could somehow destroy all nukes simultaneously and make it impossible to build new ones, we'd increase humanity's odds of survival quite a bit by doing that.

>Is the waste problem solved? Are we not still fighting with all the previous attempts of handling it? Is "dig a hole in a salt deposit and keep it there" really good enough for the very, very, very long term? It is technically solved, but politically unsolved. YMMV about how much of a deal breaker this is.

>Are old powerplants properly decommissioned and replaced with new ones when the time comes? Not a problem that you can solved today

>Can we really claim to be able to handle worst case scenarios well (e.g. Fukushima)? Yes, also Fukushima can't happen in geologically inert Western Europe.

However, what is clear is that the world needs consistent, plentiful, reliable carbon-free energy. The storage required to meet the first three conditions with renewables DOES NOT EXIST. It doesn't exist for anything outside of a few minutes. Nuclear power is: consistent, reliable and carbon-free; and humanity has known how to do it since the 1960s. In a contest between a technology we DO NOT HAVE, and one we DO, it is a no-brainer.

How is technically solved? We are talking enormous timelines for which we have to guarantee safe handling of the waste. Every try until now has proven to be inadequate.

So we are in the situation where we live with old powerplants that are not up to standard and no way to handle that but we will definitely be in the future?

„Can‘t happen“ is always the argument until it does and it‘s a difference if we are talking about something that will be over in short time or will remain a problem forever. But my point was more in the direction of how to handle that, if the solution is bury it and move far away from it, it‘s not something that can be scaled.

There are trillions of tons of uranium under your feet and somehow everything is ok.

Reliable?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...

But it isn't a competition between technology. It is a competition between industrial-societal complexes that include supply chains, resources, training, politics and a large number of flawed human beings. Having the best technology isn't enough. The human infrastructure behind is what wins. And in that respect the renewables/battery complex is just more successful. We may well be able to scale up storage to support renewables more quickly than nuclear new build.

> We may

Here it is. We just don't base the immediate future of the underlying infrastructure of our whole economies on a 'may'. We do it with proven, existing, scalable tech.

Assuming this question is made in good faith: air pollution as generated from coal and methane ("natural gas") is really bad and much worse than previously realized: https://patrickcollison.com/pollution.

The literature on it is credible: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/wh...

Nuclear produces no air pollution. It produces no direct greenhouse gases. The actual amount of centuries-long waste is tiny: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c..., particularly compared to other industrial activities.

People have some kind of aesthetic / disproportionate fear-based response to nuclear and ignore the deaths that occur due to combusting coal and methane. Most people can't or won't think numerically but we should also try to do better.

But nuclear or fossil is a false dichotomy: There are also renewables, which of course have their difficulties with intermittency but are often already now the cheapest electricity source.

Yep, for example storing old batteries full of dangerous chemicals, used for consistent energy supply is quite a challenge, or getting big amounts of lithium for those batteries. There are options of course, for example recently finished "battery" in switzerland with two big water capsules, but still there should happen many improvements in renewables and hopefully in nuclear too. Small nuclear reactors that are cheaper, easier to deploy is a promising concept too

> Is "dig a hole in a salt deposit and keep it there" really good enough for the very, very, very long term?

Yes. It's not that dangerous, the whole reason it is waste is that it's no longer radioactive enough to power the plant. (And as plant technology improves, the threshold for "no longer radioactive enough" will get even lower)

> Can we really claim to be able to handle worst case scenarios well (e.g. Fukushima)?

Fukushima led to 1 death from radiation. Nuclear's overall safety record is far better that any alternative

You're not gonna convince many sceptical people by looking only at death counts. How many people had to be relocated? How large of an area is now uninhabitable? How many would have died if our luck had been just a bit worse that day? Is there anything about the technology in all currently operating power plants which completely rules out a worst-case meltdown scenario?

People are mainly afraid of nuclear because the worst-case scenario is so insanely ridiculously bad, not because it maintains a high stable death rate.

If we only replace coal with gas and leave climate change go awry, several order of magnitudes more will become inhabitable.

>How many people had to be relocated? How large of an area is now uninhabitable? How many would have died if our luck had been just a bit worse that day?

_Hiroshima_ was re-inhabited just a few years later, and it was literally hit by a nuclear bomb.

And they are still paying the price for it. https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki

They were "lucky", btw: "since the bombs were detonated so far above the ground, there was very little contamination—especially in contrast to nuclear test sites such as those in Nevada"

Ōkuma, Fukushima is still largely a ghost town from what I can tell. Only parts of the town have been declared successfully decontaminated with residents allowed to return, and only as late as 2019.

I'm always a bit baffled by the amount of pro-renewables comments on HN. Is energy storage solved problem, or are people in northern latitudes going to freeze to death during winter?

"Green" is an extremely politicized term. The nuclear aversion has nothing to do with rational thinking and everything to do with emotions. And since most people have emotions, you can get highly educated people to be "green" extremists. These people don't balance the equation with the suffering of the poor people (which rising energy prices absolutely bring to the table), and secondary effects of green extremism like shrinking economies and inflation is not something on their radar, all that matters is that there is less CO2 being produced (or so they think), everything else is secondary and temporary.

All of that would be fine, there will always be extremists (and to a degree, we need them) and if you seriously believe in the cause, more power to you...

... the real problem is that left wing has adopted this extreme green position as one of its core elements. Now all the left wingers have to adhere to green extremism, otherwise they're not part of the team. In 2022, it is not acceptable for any member of any left leaning party to be climate moderate.

The right wing has abortion and guns, the left wing has green extremism and critical theory. Try to be openly anti-gun or pro-choice on the right wing. Try to be openly climate-moderate or anti-woke on the left wing... see what happens. THAT's the problem. Nuance in politics went completely out of the window in the last decade. It's either extreme A or extreme B. And the other side is not only wrong, it is evil.

you either have wind or you have solar. most of the time in a country as big as france there is always a place where you have tons of either one. storage is only needed for spikes, which btw. is also needed for nuclear (or you can use gas). btw. your argument is the one I think is so stupid from the pro nuclear crowd, as if peak nuclear is a solved problem. (p.s. it isn't no country in the world does use nuclear for peaks not even france.)

Winter is the time of the year most energy is produced by wind: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Germany_Monthly_Elec...

It's also not really an issue that nuclear is free from. It's very difficult for nuclear to follow demand and it is not as reliable as can be seen with France's current struggles.

The high-order bit is that nuclear waste isn't very much, is solid and is manageable. Your average US nuclear plant will produce 3 cubic meters of solid waste each year. That's about the size of a refrigerator. In the US, the vast majority of such waste is sitting inert in cooling ponds doing no harm at all, where it has been sitting for decades with no real incidents.

Compare that with a coal-fired power plant where the waste is gaseous, toxic, and enormous. Thousands and millions of tons. And fly ash is radioactive. Far more radiation is produced by coal plants than nuclear plants because of the radioactive isotopes of carbon and other trace elements. And that's just blasted right into the air. Not to mention the CO2!

I hold all power sources to the same standard. As long nuclear don't put their pollution into the air, storing it is almost infinitive better. Any energy source that just release pollution into the environment as a cost-saving strategy should be banned, which by economical standard makes all fossil fuel energy sources (and possible some bio fuel ones) nonviable.

The same is for handling worst case scenarios, and here we got a prime example for which to base a minimum standard. Hydropower dams has very bad worst case scenarios if they burst. For the person who dies, neither radiation poisoning or drowning is pretty pleasant, so which ever regulation and liability we want to apply to both is fine by me.

One option to is to ban any energy source the release pollution, and any energy source that has a risk to human lives. The candle industry would be happy, through I suspect there would be an increase in house fires.

There are at least two stances here:

1) Keeping existing nuclear power plants running and making incremental investments in them. I'm a proponent of this for the next 20-30 years because they generate carbon-free base load electricity. I don't think we have a choice given climate change - when we turn off a nuclear plant, we spin up coal and natural gas.

2) Building new nuclear plants. I'm skeptical of this - the costs don't seem to pencil out anymore and the political capital isn't there. From what I've seen we're better off investing in wind+solar+storage.

The worst-case scenarios are a real issue and I wouldn't want to bet on nuclear forever, but to me the imperative to address climate change is bigger in the near term.

You're asking us to Google all of these things for you and summarize the results into a neat coherent summary? I'd be more interested in why you're baffled by the popular opinion to begin with. What are the problems you see with the topics you bring up? Then we can cut to the misunderstandings rather than starting from scratch.

We need an alliance between nuclear fans and wind (heh) fans. You situate the nuclear fans in front of the wind fans' wind turbines. The wind fans then ask the nuclear fans about nuclear's ongoing problems with going over-budget on new builds and unresolved multi-century waste management commitments. The nuclear fans immediately try to hand-wave these objections away. The resulting draft turns the wind turbines. Viola, clean, green energy!

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

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