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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

Where do you get the uranium from? It doesn't magically fall out of the sky. It comes from heavy extractive of industry.

What's the reasonable worst case scenario with a nuclear plant failing? Is that particularly clean?

What happens to the waste? Does it have to be stored and protected long term?

Nuclear can be great at eliminating scarcity. And it can be clean in use (if you ignore extracting and refining the fuel. And ignore contamination. And ignore waste storage. And ignore decommissioning).

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I suppose these hypothetical, rhetorical questions are convincing to some, but the data on Nuclear power is pretty good.

How do you define "Clean"?

Deaths per watt? https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Maybe there's no where to store waste? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

Radiation from the waste though? "The current analysis indicates that the repository will cause less than 1 mrem/year public dose for 1,000,000 years"

Or maybe we're worried about a meltdown? Perhaps we could read up on Fukushima?

Well there, one person died from radiation, and 2000 from the evacuation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

The most at-risk individuals experienced a lifetime 1% increase chance of cancer. The rest were less that 0.5%. COVID had a bigger fatality rate initially.

let's compare that to the 20,000 people the wave killed. (The one that caused the meltdown).

These are good questions to ask, but there are, what, three total nuclear disasters to consider in modern history? And of those, only the one in Russia caused deaths (plural) and true disaster. And of the horrific conditions, incompetent design, and complete mismanagement and deliberate lying, 30 people died total.

Fossil fuel pollution is responsible for (by some figures) 1 in 5 deaths worldwide. Enough.

Oh I forgot. Let's talk about transport danger.

Uranium is 16,000 as energy dense as Coal (and coal is the densest) . That means you'd need ONE tanker sized craft to transport way, way more fuel than all the tankers of the world.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/468405/global-oil-tanker...

And just imagine how many miles nuclear powered Aircraft Carriers have traversed without significant incident since the 1960’s.

Navy nuclear safety is the result of planning and engineering and obscene amounts of money. There is no way commercial energy plants could profit if they spent the resources the navy does.

ok. how about France? They get 70% of their power from Nuclear, starting in 1962.

Over half our reactors are currently stopped because of various corrosion issues, we regularly have to stop some because of drought, etc.

France might have been the poster child for nuclear energy, but it’s on the verge of becoming a poster child for what happens after you over rely on it for two decade.

Sure, they wear out. Nobody said otherwise. But I haven't heard of a major incident in either the US Navy or France, the nation.

> but it’s on the verge of becoming a poster child for what happens after you over rely on it for two decade.

No, it's on the verge of becoming a poster child for what happens if you _neglect it_ for two decades.

So, how do you get large energy conglomerates and oligopolies from neglecting this infrastructure? Mega corps, especially energy corps in the US, aren't exactly known for playing by the book and are very much known for cutting every available corner. The proponents of nuclear fission often forget that greed and neglect runs rampant.

> So, how do you get large energy conglomerates and oligopolies from neglecting this infrastructure?

This isn't unique to private sector - public infrastructure suffers from underinvestment too.

The same way that you get GCHP, coal, wind and solar infrastructure, or roads and rail infrastructure supported - long term backing from governments.

> The proponents of nuclear fission often forget that greed and neglect runs rampant.

And the opposers will point at the failures and ignore the huge successes of decades of low cost, low carbon electricity globally around the world.

Looking at the UK (where I live, purely because I'm familiar with the situation here) the newest currently operating nuclear plant here was built in 1995, meanwhile the oldest gas plant in the country was built in 1993. The operating lifespan of the majority of these power stations has been 50 years, meanwhile we're still building them and struggling to build _one_ nuclear plant here in the last 30 years.

So to answer your original question - stop having them build gas power plants and have them invest in nuclear plants instead.

France is the poster child for what happens when green energy activists strangle the industry after it's built, as opposed to before.

They get 70% of their electricity from nuclear. Only about a third of France's power is nuclear: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

"power" means electricity

A third of their energy usage is nuclear. This will change as electric cars become more common

Yeah, it will go down. France is not building enough new nuclear to replace aging reactors. They'd have to build way more to replace oil and gas.

Isn't the US Navy somewhat notorious for misusing its money?

Yes, but the 'nuclear Navy' is practically a whole separate branch-within-a-branch of the Navy.

It's true that the Navy spends a lot of money, but it's also true that the Navy can be (and has been) wasteful in terms of spending.

What this means is that commercial power can in principle achieve the same safety outcomes with planning and engineering and maybe something south of 'obscene' amounts of money.

This is actually what happened when the commercial power industry first started. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_Rowe_Nuclear_Power_Stat...

There's also the fact that a lot of the expense for the nuclear Navy is having to achieve militarized and maritime variants of gear that can be produced much more simply for civilian applications on land. Fitting anything into a submarine is going to be expensive, including diesel engines, but we don't use that as a reason to say diesel is not practical for civilian transport elsewhere.

Maybe energy production shouldn’t be viewed as a profit center? Socializing the thing modern civilization depends on makes sense - with unlimited energy there would be plenty of other ways to make money.

If it wasn't a profit center we may still be burning wood.

Maybe, but since its not 1715 any more, I’m going to focus on what makes sense currently.

Fair; but at the same time I have a feeling we would not hear much about it if theirs was issues

>30 people died total.

Those are the official Soviet figures, right? My understanding is that these were laughably understated.

I don't disagree with the rest of your analysis, but my experience is that people become more hostile to nuclear power when we fail to be transparent with the numbers. Moreover, even if we assume a liberal 10k deaths from the Chernobyl reactor, the math still works out in your favor.

> Those are the official Soviet figures, right?

official international numbers

There is consensus that a total of approximately 30 people died from immediate blast trauma and acute radiation syndrome (ARS) in the seconds to months after the disaster, respectively, with 60 in total in the decades since, inclusive of later radiation induced cancer

The contested numbers are those related to long term radiation exposure

There is no strong evidence of an increase in deaths

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_...

Fair enough, though detractors would probably quibble about the “direct” part.

If you talk to people born in the late 80s to early 90s in the areas near Chernobyl you’ll find out that many kids died in their teens and early 20s or are living with cancer today. Maybe they didn’t die, but they no longer have thyroids. Saying that 60 total died from Chernobyl is insulting.

WHO talked to them

Still no strong evidence found

WHO is not working for USSR AFAIK

> that many kids died in their teens and early 20s or are living with cancer today.

that's not surprising

there are many people who are living with cancer worldwide

radiation exposure is not the only cause for cancer

I truly wish it was

My dad worked in oncology, he saw too many people die of cancer in the past 45 years.

Long before Chernobyl was a thing.

> Maybe they didn’t die, but they no longer have thyroids

Half of my family no longer has thyroids, they are all from Italy, born between 1945 and 1974.

All of them are still alive and well.

> Saying that 60 total died from Chernobyl is insulting

but it still might be the truth

High rates of cancer in teenagers is not surprising? I’m not talking about 50+, I’m talking about tumors at 16-25 at a rate high enough that you can ask a Belarusian kid if they still talk to their high school friends and they’ll answer “many died already” which is not the normal answer you get from those questions. I don’t understand your correlation of people who are 90 without thyroids vs people in their 20s that had tumors and had to have them removed. Your dads job is to see people with cancer, of course he sees a lot of them. It’s like a mechanic saying “I see lots of broken engines, therefore any engine that’s broken is normal, even if it’s at 20000km”

> only the one in Russia

Nit: it was in Ukraine.

Yep, IIRC the only nuclear disasters with deaths in Russia were Kyshtym and during the construction of K-320 submarine.

Where do you get the uranium from? It doesn't magically fall out of the sky. It comes from heavy extractive of industry.

As opposed to the Windmill Fairy?

What's the reasonable worst case scenario with a nuclear plant failing?

Using Fukushima as an example, the worst case is that fewer people died as a result of the meltdown than died from the hasty reaction of shutting down all of Japan's other nuclear plants (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/10/31/shutting-...).

What happens to the waste?

It's contained, which is a large improvement over spewing it into the atmosphere.

These clever questions you're asking have been studied extensively, and nuclear comes out far ahead of fossil fuels on every conceivable metric. You can try to make the argument that we don't need to build any more nuclear plants because wind and solar will provide everything we need in 10 years, although you'll need to explain why this is true now when people have been incorrectly claiming it for 40+ years. But if you're shutting down nuclear plants and burning more coal as a result (hello Germany), you've taken a very wrong turn.

At this point the cost of Fukushima in yen and in lives blighted by evacuations will be far far above any positive contribution from the plant.

Literally zero people died in the immediate aftermath, and in the years since one person who worked at the plant has died.

The data is clear, in terms of deaths per TWh of generated power, nuclear is the safest, cleanest form of power we have. [1]

Coal power kills between 24 and 100 people per TWh generated (100 for brown coal). Nuclear is 0.03 - between industrial solar and wind, and significantly lower than rooftop solar. It also has a lower carbon impact than both wind and solar.

Yes people were evacuated. But they'd have been evacuated anyways whatever kind of plant was there.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

I wasn’t talking about deaths but about cost. The data is pretty clear on that too which is why solar and wind have risen while new fission plants decline.

You are experiencing bog-standard selection bias. The positive contribution is from all nuclear plants, not just Fukushima. Your point would only make sense if all nuclear plants had similar accidents.

An analogy to your argument: TWA flight 800 killed all its passengers, therefore all flights should be banned.

Edit: maybe try to learn your own internal biases, because I suspect you would make better arguments if you understood your weaknesses.

I said nothing about banning fusion power plants, so your analogy is incorrect and your cod psychology on my motivation or ‘biases’ unhelpful.

The full cost of nuclear including externalities is lower than say coal, but far higher than wind or solar or even hydro and the market has spoken as a result.

An area of Japan and an area of Ukraine are now uninhabitable for a generation or two due to previous disasters. The cost of that is very very high and more than most societies are willing to bear even if in theory the risk is low, but more importantly decommissioning costs on waste and plants are huge, so fusion is far behind.

Roger that. Fusion is irrelevant - I did not mention it.

Sorry, I meant Fission of course (existing plants), Fusion seems more promising in terms of outlay vs return.

The mining and waste are much smaller scale due to the incredible energy density of nuclear.

Look at how ugly coal gets, for the same amount of energy. Kids down in the mines, miner's strikes when it ended, people dying of smog. All sorts of terrible things derived from coal need to be included in this comparison.

The only thing nuclear really has against it is that when it goes wrong it can go really wrong. And people have thought about those modes of failure quite a bit, so why don't we see if they've come up with something?

We should try nuclear and see where it goes.

There is also the nuclear weapons proliferation bit. I'm honestly more concerned about that than accidents.

It doesn't have to be that way. I'm no great fan of Nuclear power (although mostly because we know it will be privatised and the private company running it will suddenly be bankrupt when it comes to the clean up) but the US and Russia hid a lot of their weapons development behind "too cheap to meter" nuclear power stations.

I wouldn't guarantee they would not do that again, but the incentives are very different this time around, so the design of the power stations shouldn't produce material suitable for modern nuclear weapons as a side effect.

Regarding privatization, we could easily require private companies to put up a bond/insurance for the cleanup so they pay for it ahead of time thus preventing issues if they go bankrupt. I say “easily” because passing anti-nuclear regulation seems to be the one thing the US federal government can get done effectively.

>Nuclear can be great at eliminating scarcity. And it can be clean in use (if you ignore extracting and refining the fuel. And ignore contamination. And ignore waste storage. And ignore decommissioning).

Now apply the same analysis to the manufacture of solar panels and lithium batteries.

The consensus on nuclear waste seems to be, largely: store it in dry casks on site.

One great thing about nuclear waste is that there really is fuck all of it.

Clean up those 20,000 barrels of DDT off the coast of California and dump all the nuclear dry casks of all nuclear waste there instead and the world would be much better place.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-04-30/barrels-leaki...

Shame on everyone down-voting this.

These are real grievances that real people have about nuclear, and silencing those people and the questions they raise does great harm to a potentially nuclear-powered future.

It's not perfect, but it's a lot more clean than fossil fuels.

There's four billion tons dissolved in the ocean. But even if you weren't interested, switching to breeder reactors would make the terrestrial supply last 100x longer. And of course there's thorium cycle which dramatically expands the supply too. Supply is not an issue.

But last time I looked, nobody's ever built a commercial thorium reactor. Solar is here right now.

Every time I hear people push nuclear I get a sense of "perfect is the enemy of good". Sure, nuclear is better in some dimensions. But along the "short term deployability" dimension, it's just not in the running.

What I notice is pro nuclear people talk in superlatives. Wind and solar people talk in terms of scale and economics.

> Wind and solar people talk in terms of scale and economics.

Until you ask them about energy storage, and then they start talking in superlatives.

People that claim storage is a problem don't offer numbers either.

[edit](Grid storage is probably not going to be a problem; I'm not sure it's not my area) - but the supply of fissile material is definitely not an issue. Literally the reason we don't look at breeder and thorium cycle is because we have more than enough uranium. If we start to run out, we have a path forward.

The most annoying thing about anti-reneweable people pretending to be nuclear fans is that they don't realise that nuclear grids need "storage" the same as renewable grids.

Here's nuclear fan David Mackay to explain it to you, in a quote from his 2008 book:

> If we kick fossil fuels and go all-out for renewables, or all-out for nuclear, or a mixture of the two, we may have a problem. Most of the big renewables are not turn-off-and-onable. When the wind blows and the sun comes out, power is there for the taking; but maybe two hours later, it’s not available any more. Nuclear power stations are not usually designed to be turn-offand- onable either. They are usually on all the time, and their delivered power can be turned down and up only on a timescale of hours. This is a problem because, on an electricity network, consumption and production must be exactly equal all the time. The electricity grid can’t store energy. To have an energy plan that adds up every minute of every day, we therefore need something easily turn-off-and-onable. It’s commonly assumed that the easily turn-off-and-onable something should be a source of power that gets turned off and on to compensate for the fluctuations of supply relative to demand (for example, a fossil fuel power station!). But another equally effective way to match supply and demand would be to have an easily turn-off-and-onable demand for power – a sink of power that can be turned off and on at the drop of a hat.

> Either way, the easily turn-off-and-onable something needs to be a big something because electricity demand varies a lot

https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_186.shtml

The thing is, I think David Mackay is attacking a strawman - or at least it feels like you're using it that way. I don't think anyone is saying we should have solely nuclear. We know of course that nuclear is suitable for base load but not for variable load. Wind and solar are great to build on top of. And yeah, we'll still need gas peaker plants even with grid storage more than likely.

Mackay does go on to hit the nail on the head at the very end - a big problem for power grids is that variable supply like peaker plants are incredibly expensive, whereas controlling demand via smart grid is significantly, significantly cheaper.

The Ontario grid is basically perfect, IMO. 59% nuclear. 24% hydro. 8% wind. [1] 92% zero-carbon. 7% natural gas, what I assume is peaker capacity. Sure, that could be replaced by grid storage. But we're talking 5% improvement overall from grid storage. Incremental, not a step-change.

[1] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...

He's not attacking anything, he's pointing out that renewables need a method to balance demand and so does nuclear, and so do grids with large amounts of either/both.

He does this because he wanted to build lots of nuclear and phase out fossil fuels, and he wanted to work out how to do that for real within physical and economic constraints.

Hydro (which was often built alongside nuclear for this very reason) is one such answer. Demand response is another. Green/pink hydrogen another. All apply equally well to nuclear and renewables. Some make sense even for gas grids and that's where we started rolling them out.

Which is bad news for nuclear, because once you build enough of these solutions, you just need to choose the cheapest way to generate the bulk energy, which probably involves a lot of wind and solar and not much nuclear.

> you just need to choose the cheapest way to generate the bulk energy.

I disagree with that framing, I think we deserve better than the cheapest way. We deserve the best way. Cost factors in but is not the be all and end all.

Are wind and solar viable at scale? My understanding was that you would need a non-existant storage solution to accommodate inconsistent production capacity.

Last time I looked, people were running uranium reactors that were incredibly productive and reliable.

I thought we were talking about building new capacity?

Surely the two are related?

> But last time I looked, nobody's ever built a commercial thorium reactor. Solar is here right now.

The CANDU design supports thorium fuel. In fact, India is looking to take advantage of this. [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

> Sure, nuclear is better in some dimensions. But along the "short term deployability" dimension, it's just not in the running.

I've heard the exact same argument in favor of Nuclear. As I understand, the argument is that renewables need a grid-scale storage solution to be viable as a complete solution to our energy needs, since wind and the sun are not consistent and reliable everywhere. That solution doesn't exist yet, so we need to supplement renewables. If we have to do that, Nuclear is a better option than fossil fuels.

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