Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

einpoklum

> It's way easier.

Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget?

> It has been working fine since the 1950s.

Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch:

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

> Waste problem is solved

The solution being: Ignore it, I guess?

> net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution

And we fight wars for peace too.

> It's zero carbon

Not if you count the mining aspect. But even if you didn't: Wind and solar are now 3 times cheaper or more, and take a lot less time to set up. The power output stability benefit is wearing thin.

View on HN

Groan here we go again.

> Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch:

Now show me list of the 8 million people who die per year from air pollution.

https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution

> The solution being: Ignore it, I guess?

I mentioned the solutions but didn't provide a link. here you go.

https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html

> And we fight wars for peace too.

See the literature https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh05000e.html

> Not if you count the mining aspect.

Nuclear has rock bottom full lifecycle carbon emissions of 12 gCO₂-eq/kWh, including mining. C.f. 11 for wind, 40 for solar, 490 for gas, 800+ for coal. Hard to beat.

> Wind and solar are now 3 times cheaper or more

You're comparing the worst US nuclear builds with wind/solar without storage, transmission, overbuilds needed for storage, etc. LCOE is not an appropriate metric for systems costs. Never was. Lazard are a bunch of kooks. Look at Hualong One costs.

Details on cost comparison for deeply decarbonized grid here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.006

> Groan here we go again.

Yeah, we do with more pro-nuclear propaganda and outright falsehoods (again).

> Now show me list of the 8 million people who die per year from air pollution.

No, it doesn't. Here's the exact quote from your source:

> The combined effects of ambient air pollution and household air pollution is associated with 7 million premature deaths annually.

Not "die from" but "is associated with". What does that mean? "Associated with" here means "reduces the life expectancy", basically. That's a far cry from "dies from". The primary relationship with mortality seems to come from particulates. Some of these are natural (eg sand in deserts), some of it isn't (eg cooking fires). It also includes motor vehicle exhausts.

To give you a sense of the level of bullshit going on here, other conditions are getting attributed to air pollution [1]:

> They linked nine causes of death with the pollution: cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, dementia, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lung cancer and pneumonia.

One study estimates 100,000 Americans die every year from air pollution [2]. That just doesn't pass the smell test and shows you what's going on: it's attributing air pollution to certain medical conditions and then counting deaths from those conditions are air pollution deaths.

Exaggerations and outright lies do your cause a massive disservice.

Pro-nuclear propaganda doesn't address these issues:

1. Not a single nuclear power plant has been built without significant government subsidies;

2. Nuclear power plant falsely reduce costs by externalizing significant costs such as the processing of fuel, the processing of fuel processing waste, maintenance, inspection (eg by the NRC), switching out fuel, processing nuclear fuel, the time-to-build or the failure modes of nuclear plants. Lest we forget, the Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone is 1,000 square miles 35 years later.

If these next-generation LWRs are so economical, why isn't someone building them at scale? The standard response is political opposition but what about China?

I swear nuclear fan boys are just as delusional as climate deniers.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/20/us-air-p...

[2]: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-04-0...

"As of June 2021, China has a total nuclear power generation capacity of 49.6 GW from 50 reactors, with additional 17.1 GW under construction" (1)

Fair enough, I have not checked whether those are the previously mentioned lwrs, but I would argue that those numbers are definitely "scale"

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

> One study estimates 100,000 Americans die every year from air pollution

That's still a lot more deaths than commercial nuclear fusion has been associated with in the US. It's also, incidentally, a lot of deaths.

> 1. Not a single nuclear power plant has been built without significant government subsidies.

This is a non-sequitur. Just because something needs government subsidies doesn't make it bad. Things like the Internet, modern solar energy, and the USPS were built with either massive initial subsidies or even complete government involvement throughout their ongoing lifetimes. That doesn't make them bad.

> 2. Nuclear power plant falsely reduce costs by externalizing significant costs such as the processing of fuel, the processing of fuel processing waste, maintenance, inspection (eg by the NRC), switching out fuel, processing nuclear fuel, the time-to-build or the failure modes of nuclear plants. Lest we forget, the Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone is 1,000 square miles 35 years later.

Versus coal and oil plants, which externalize the costs of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Also, comparing a shoddily built and designed Soviet plant to modern Western ones isn't a good comparison.

> If these next-generation LWRs are so economical, why isn't someone building them at scale? The standard response is political opposition but what about China?

In the West, it's negative perception that largely predates widespread public awareness of climate change. As for China, it looks like China's getting in on the nuclear game too, precisely because of air pollution concerns. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

> delusional as climate deniers

Yeah, no. Even if us supporters of nuclear power are wrong, we don't need to be compared to people who are on the level of flat earthers.

> That's still a lot more deaths than commercial nuclear fusion

You missed the point about how this is a completley made up number and even if it wasn't, nuclear power plants (vs emissions from burning fossil fuels) would only address a small portion of deaths anyway.

> Just because something needs government subsidies doesn't make it bad.

No one said bad. Try "uneconomical".

> Also, comparing a shoddily built and designed Soviet plant to modern Western ones isn't a good comparison.

Ah yes, nuclear proponents love to exclude Chernobyl as an outlier because they have no answer for it. In this case, it was a "shoddily built and designed Soviet plant".

So anyone who pays attention to regulation in the United States (and elsewhere) should be aware of the "revoling door", which is also called "regulatory capture". This is where in a given regulated industry (eg oil and gas, pharmaceuticals) people will work for the regulator then private industry then the regulator and so on to the point where that regulation becomes ineffective.

We see another clear example of the Appeals Court for the Federal Circuit being staffed by all ex-patent lawyers who weirdly pretty much side with patent holders every time.

Part of the problem with nuclear is the human component. It's easy to ignore maintenance in the interests of profit. The natural tendency will be for the revolving door to weaken regulation.

So you want to dismiss Chernobyl as being "shoddily built" (and likely poorly maintained) but that's exactly what would happen with nuclear power regulation.

How about a non-Soviet disaster: Fukushima. What will be the reason to dismiss that one? Earthquakes? One in a million natural disaster? Some other reason to exclude another inconvenience?

> I swear nuclear fan boys are just as delusional as climate deniers.

No, some of us actually have operated a reactor for a living, and have first hand experience with the technology, and most of the issues people like to discuss. In my case, I served in the US Navy in nuclear propulsion. This whole debate seems crazy. Truth is the tech works, and it should be inexpensive compared to burning fossil fuels. Then there is the absolutely incredible difference in energy density - a two 13mmx13mm fuel pellets contains roughly the same energy as 1 ton of coal, or 260 gallons of oil. As far as renewables go, it has to be much worse for the world to build the 1650 wind turbines, wire them, and so on that it takes to match a typical single civilian reactor. To those of us who have worked with the technology, we know it could really change the world's carbon problem.

The reason the cost is so high - and remember, the cost of technology usually goes down over time in a normal functioning market, is hyper-regulation at every level of government. From mining and refining fuel to building plants to operating them, there is an insane amount of regulation and litigation over that regulation. The over-regulation argument is really annoying, mostly because it is true.

It's also true that there are some issues around dealing with waste. Most of these are easily solved, but will not be for the same over-regulation reasons. We've taken perfectly good tech and through the power of bureaucracy, made it unworkable.

> In my case, I served in the US Navy in nuclear propulsion.

Ah, the US military, famous for building and operating things at low cost.

> Truth is the tech works

Nuclear propulsion works because it has the US military to secure it but more importantly, a carrier or a submarine benefits from not carrying fuel in a way that has nothing to do with economics. You power a submarine with nuclear simply because there's no other way for such a submarine to spend months at sea without refueling.

You say the tech works. OK, but so what? That has almost nothing to do with anything. In fact you're extrapolating the military use case for using nuclear energy for propulsion and saying we should extend that to civilian commercial power generation.

As for the rest about over-regulation, the first point is that you have to deal with the political and legal reality. But really it's a smoke screen because proponents of nuclear power like to talk about operating costs while ignoring capital expenditure (which is massive). From a total cost per kWh over the lifetime of a nuclear power plant, it's not really that cheap.

> As for the rest about over-regulation, the first point is that you have to deal with the political and legal reality.

Reality: regulatory compliance is the bulk of the cost.

I think you're being pretty quick to write off a subject matter expert on a topic that is their own field of expertise.

Their field involved exactly zero need for economic analysis.

Naval reactor "engineering laboratory technicians" (SMAGs) are reputed among submariners as habitual liars. Strange but true.

> Their field involved exactly zero need for economic analysis.

This is just dismissing the argument without addressing the assertion that the vast majority of cost in building nuclear is imposed by overly burdensome regulation.

> Naval reactor "engineering laboratory technicians" (SMAGs) are reputed among submariners as habitual liars.

From personal experience, ELTs were held to the exact same zero tolerance for lies standard I was. If you were caught by anyone lying you were out. Rank didn't even mater, nor did it matter if they were nukes or not. If you lied and it was caught, nuclear career over. I watched many people end their careers over how many push-ups they completed in a fitness test, covering for a buddy who was out with a girl when they shouldn't have been, lying about getting a tattoo, or even lying about what they ate for lunch. It was absolutely brutal.

I doesn't make up SMAGs' reputation: all I know is what retired "nukes" report. Ask them.

I was a nuke.

Ok, then you must know some others. Ask them. I'll wait.

> I swear nuclear fan boys are just as delusional as climate deniers.

Just an FYI, acidburn is a reactor scientist. It feels a bit silly to call them a "fanboy". Also, I can verify they care deeply about climate change.

I'm also not personally actually aware of any nuclear fan boys or scientists that are climate deniers. They just argue "nuclear + renewables" vs "renewables". Why's that so hard to get? They aren't arguing for coal, oil, or natural gas like climate deniers do.

8 million deaths annually from air pollution is pretty well supported by a number of methodologically sound studies, with anthropogenic air pollution being responsible for more than half of all air pollution deaths [0].

We let the US nuclear construction industry die, so it's pretty expensive to rebuild a workforce with the skills to build new nuclear plants, and that has contributed to the cost of nuclear power rising above some other power sources [1], but that's only because the cost of CO2 pollution isn't accounted for, which is a massive subsidy for fossil fuel power producers.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/data-review-air-pollution-deaths

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

> Lest we forget, the Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone is 1,000 square miles 35 years later.

Ah yes, the Soviet reactor that was built with a known fatal design flaw, then operated well outside of safety parameters during an experiment, is the be-all end-all of nuclear safety.

> Now show me list of the 8 million people who die per year from air pollution.

Are you comparing to coal-fired plants? I'm talking about solar and wind.

As for fossil fuels, the expected deaths and environmental from nuclear accidents are - well, TBH, I don't know the math for that, but I would expect it would be on the order of magnitude of the extra deaths from fossil fuel electricity generation.

> I mentioned the solutions

I will actually look into that. However, the website says: "Finland ... No other country has yet reached the implementation phase of final disposal. ... final disposal of high-level spent nuclear fuel has not yet been launched anywhere."

So, that's not what's being used so far. This company's new approach - maybe it's great, I don't know, but it needs to last thousands of years, right? That's a very high bar - and a significant maintenance and hazard-management burden going forward.

> Lazard are a bunch of kooks.

That's a pretty strong claim. But - since I'm not an expert, I can't outright dismiss it. They're a popular source for a "bunch of kooks"... care to elaborate?

> Look at Hualong One costs.

I would look into them, if I could.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...

How many industries are there where the list of notable accidents has such few fatalities? I mean, have you actually looked at the accidents on that list? The vast majority of them are basically garden-variety industrial accidents--and there's only so many because people are minded to exhaustively list every mishap that occurs at a nuclear power plant in a way that they're not for, say, a coal power plant.

Well, Chernobyl will likely end up killing about as many people as have ever died in a commercial jet crash.

Probability of accident * Expected damage of accident = Expected damage of activity/project.

Nuclear has had non-negligible probability of accidents, including dangerous accidents. The expected damage of the dangerous accidents is millions dead and injured, and potential destruction of very wide ecosystems.

An accident in a coal power plant mean a bunch of coal burning. Which is bad, but several orders of magnitude less.

... And that's all while ignoring the question of waste management; and damage to reactors due to attacks at wartime.

Now, has technology improved in recent decades? I'm sure it has, to some extent. But the credibility and trustworthiness of the organizations building nuclear power plants has not improved, certainly not to the level at which lay-people - like myself - are willing to take their word for it. And that includes key world state governments.

At what point do we observe no accident causing millions of deaths or injuries and adjust our "expected damage" calculation? Decades? Centuries?

We can look past the damage caused by an accident at a coal plant and just count the damage caused by ordinary routine operation of coal plants and quickly reach damage figures that eclipse every nuclear accident in history combined.

> At what point etc.

Your second paragraph suggests that we are not at that point yet.

But to be less facetious - after the regulatory systems in the relevant country reach a state of high trustworthiness and no indications of 'capture' + a few decades' buffer for the trustworthy regulation's effect to permeate.

And this is ignoring the question of chances of damage by war and the issue of waste management, so maximum over the minimum period for each of these 3 considerations.

You're begging the question. I'm not saying one can't advocate against nuclear power on the merits, either because it's too dangerous or because it's too poorly regulating. I'm saying that it can't be reasonable to do so based on the premise that it causes million-victim fatal accidents, because (1) it doesn't, and (2) other mainstream energy sources do cause mass fatalities and aren't condemned.

Waste problem - drive through the US state of Nevada. There’s nothing for hundreds of miles. You could likely just throw the waste out of an airplane over Nevada and be more or less fine.

With containment techniques combined with the ridiculous amount of uninhabited desert the US has, this is a non issue.

France, with much less uninhabited land, and vastly more nuclear power plants, somehow manages to place waste in a way that's acceptable for an EU country, and neighboring countries.

(But of course "waste" is not really waste, it's fuel spent for a few per cent; a breeder reactor + reprocessing should burn it again and again and again.)

>After decades of cooling, France, like most other nuclear power generating countries, has no long-term solution in place for high and intermediate spent fuel waste disposal.

https://www.power-technology.com/analysis/managing-nuclear-w...

Yes, short term they manage it.

When we are discussing the future, our concern is long term.

When we are discussing climate change, our concern is not long term.

If we could build the nuclear reactors now, keep the spent fuel (whether or not we're going to reuse it in breeder reactors) as safe as we know how, and solve the long-term problem later, then we'd have a much better chance of there being a later to worry about.

Climate change is both.

People proposing nuclear energy as this wonderful overlooked strategy are not consider why it's consistently self limiting.

It's not a "solved" problem inthe long term

The long term plan is to reprocess it, which is why we need to keep it around in the meantime. If we just wanted to get rid of it that would be trivially easy. But we don’t want that because we know in future we’re going to want to get it back from wherever we put it.

They've given up on fast reactors. Reprocessing with thermal reactors doesn't actually solve the problem, as MOX fuel cannot then be further reprocessed and used in thermal reactors again. You still end up with all the fission products, and now the higher actinides from spent MOX, to deal with.

Having said that, dry casks are a perfectly cromulent way to deal with spent fuel.

The main motivation to not reprocess fuel was nuclear nonproliferation, because it frees up the plutonium for nuclear weapons. But on the off chance that governments ever want to build a giant pile of nuclear weapons it’s sensible to not get rid of the nuclear waste, since if it ever turns out you do want it again it’s very expensive and time consuming to produce. Since you’ve already gone to all of the effort of mining the uranium and producing a bunch of plutonium, best to just keep it around somewhere in case you ever do want it for some reason.

I'd say the main motivation to not reprocess is that it costs more than not reprocessing. It's a net economic loss.

They already tried this in Nevada and failed for political reasons [1]. Dumping nuclear waste in the desert may be a non issue to you (and to me as well), but to a lot of people - particularly people who actually live in Nevada - it is a very serious issue.

The question of how to dispose of nuclear waste - in a manner that is satisfying to the residents of the state where it is being disposed - remains an unsolved issue in the US. And the current policy is to basically just ignore the waste. It’s being stored for the time being at reactor sites in steel and concrete casks - which I don’t think anyone would argue is a sufficient solution.

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

All you're saying here is, "people object to it." Or is there something more substantive?

> in a manner that is satisfying to the residents of the state where it is being disposed

No, that is basically NIMBY. Of course some residents won't like nuclear waste buried underground, 100 miles from them in a place they'll never go and where no one lives. I don't know how to not sound callous about that.

Yes I am basically saying people object to it. And in a democracy that’s a fairly important detail that you can’t just write off as a “non issue”.

Many people also hate renewable energy for ideological reasons. People can be persuaded, or, in a democracy, simply outvoted by a critical mass of supporters. Nuclear power has been losing the propaganda war for decades in the United States, but that’s not a reason to give up on it forever.

> Yes I am basically saying people object to it. And in a democracy that’s a fairly important detail that you can’t just write off as a “non issue”.

We do this all the time.

People object to living next to the airport. They object to new roads. They object to schools being built, rail lines, bus stops, even hospitals.

Yet, we weigh the pros for society against the cons for specific people. That's why we have a country with any infrastructure. If we simply gave in whenever someone said no, we would all be dead in an empty field.

So France isn't a democracy? In a democracy, minorities have rights, but they don't have an infinite veto.

As someone else says, "People object to living next to the airport. They object to new roads. They object to schools being built, rail lines, bus stops, even hospitals."

Where I live, the old Orchard Supply store is being turned into a Costco. There are people objecting to that, too.

While you may think it unfair to compare, the 3 coal slurry spills (from power plants) which happened in the US to date had ranges of impact on the order of hundreds of miles and included impacts to drinking water.

I have little doubt the NIMBY's are recalling one or more of these incidents.

And this is just limiting the scope to power plant related waste. If you talk about industry in general you have many decades of weird cancers and nonpotable tap water in various parts of the country. The lack of trust comes from precedent.

The oil business deals with NIMBYs by making it worth their while. If oils is found on your land, you get lots of cash. “Beverly Hillbilly’s”.

Treat nuclear the same way. Don’t ask towns to host nuclear facilities out of the goodness of their hearts. Make it worth their while.

If nuclear power starts raising real estate value, the NIMBYs shut up.

> Treat nuclear the same way. Don’t ask towns to host nuclear facilities out of the goodness of their hearts. Make it worth their while.

The nuclear industry doesn't generate the money for that kind of lubrication; they demand more subsidies and immunities than they already have to build anything as it is.

The Department of Defense doesn’t generate cash, but people love having those bases nearby.

Thousands of salaries is cash.

That's a cost to the DoD. The point was that government can easily subsidize nuclear waste storage, just as it subsidizes the military.

The reason Yucca Mountain sputtered out was that it wasn't really needed. It's cheaper to just put the spent fuel in dry casks for a few centuries, even if the stuff is then buried (or reprocessed, or shot into space). Given there was no $$ incentive to make YM work, any amount of opposition could stop it.

> political problem

But that was the problem with Yucca - it was chosen exclusively for its “scientific” value - remoteness. They didn’t event take transportation costs into account.

If you start with the political aspects, it becomes really, really easy to solve.

How many towns and cities are there with plants shutting down? How many with a history of military and nuclear facilities?

I know one town in particular that is trying to specialize in nuclear work. They have consultants, training programs, etc. Why not call them?

It failed for more than political reasons. Long term repositories are pretty complex and have extremely unique problems to resolve (such as communicating with intelligent lifeforms that may not recognize our danger symbols). Just see all that went into the long term seed storage buildings. But really, we've learned enough in the last (almost) century to learn that we probably don't need long term repositories.

> > It's way easier.

> Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget?

'Late and over-budget' sounds easier than 'has never been demonstrated'.

The solution being: Ignore it, I guess?

The waste is completely solid and can be safely buried and forgotten. Is that ignorance?

Fission reactors can be easier than fusion reactors, and still go over time and hugely over budget. This just means fusion reactors are likely to also go over time and budget.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com