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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I don't understand why we can't do both. I don't think this has to be framed as a zero sum problem (I think way too many issues are naively framed that way). With reference to the article, the funding levels over the past decade (globally) were roughly $200m/yr. That's really nothing in terms of government money and well within the realm that just the US could sustain such an effort alone. It would be roughly 0.004% of our yearly budget! That's an insanely low amount of money to spend given the potential upsides. You're right that there's weapons proliferation problems with both, but honestly that also seems like a good argument for pulling that funding out of what is already allocated to military budgets (not trying to defend nuclear weapons here, but we do have to acknowledge the existence of the military industrial complex and that they dictate a lot of the US budget).

> Anyway let's ~~just~~ do fission you guys.

So I agree with you. Let's do fission, but not _just_ fission. Let's put a lot of money into it and bring down the costs. The cost of climate change clearly far outweighs the cost of nuclear plants and waste. And that the waste really isn't a problem, as you yourself have extensively written about. These arguments always go "nuclear vs x" and honestly I want to see "fission + fusion + solar + wind + hydro + batteries." I don't see why we can't have it all. The zero sum arguments seem to make such a dream more difficult to achieve.

Also, good to see you back. Always glad to see your input on these posts.

View on HN

Sure, that's a good and fair point. I shouldn't say I oppose fusion R&D. I feel more like we should be more focused on deploying 100s of serialized LWR fission plants right now alongside all the wind/solar/batteries/hydro to solve climate change, while also investing R&D into things like advanced fission and fusion, and geothermal. There's certainly an under-investment in low carbon energy tech in general compared to the world GDP imho.

Still, I do feel that some fusion hype is partially due to people not giving fission enough credit though.

Happy to be back, thanks!

Yeah, then we're on the same page.

But one note, I don't think fusion has the same uphill battle that fission does. You mentioned that the fission industry just hasn't been able to properly demonstrate what they can do, but I don't think this is entirely it. We do have to consider the decades worth of campaigning and lobbying by coal and gas that went after nuclear. That these campaigns even infiltrated the biggest green lobbying groups: Sierra Nevada and Green Peace. Fusion doesn't have this same battle to overcome. I'm in the state just south of you and we're very pro green, but our green politicians still talk about fission and "the dangers." Hanford is still discussed with a lot of fervor. Such history and momentum doesn't exist with fusion other than "20 years away." I understand why a lot of people have effectively given up and why a lot of climate scientists don't bring it up, but will admit that they aren't against fission (usually with that precise wording). Honestly, I think it is more on the climate scientists at this point to be vocal about it.

People are scared of the word nuclear, and that applies to fusion as well.

    Honestly, I think it is more on the climate 
    scientists at this point to be vocal about it.

I think you hit the nail on the head here.

It's understandable that science-illiterate, climate change-denier types fear fission. The fossil fuel industry has done an excellent job percolating their pro fossil-fuel agenda and fomenting fear of the unknown. This is the unavoidable enemy.

The only way to counter this would be for green types (Greenpeace, etc, as you say) and climate scientists to unite and promote fission. I do not think this is remotely likely, but it is the only thing that would remotely stand a chance of countering the fossil fuel industry in the battle for public mindset and votes. I would be absolutely stunned if this happened before billions are displaced due to fossil fuel-caused climate change, and I actually don't think it will happen even then. The status quo will continue as long as the fossil fuel companies remain rich... so, basically until civilizational collapse.

Simply put, fission got an extremely raw deal. It was stabbed in the back and buried by the people who should have supported it, based on their stated goals and beliefs.

Nothing can survive that.

This conversation seems to me a bit outdated: building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives. To get something cheaper, we need to wait for the next gen of technology, in one or two decades. Lucky if we can compete with the costs of solar, wind and batteries in a decade.

Even with the support of greens, government, scientists, etc this is going no where.

Nuclear fission is dead, why trying to revive it? What's the point?

    building a fission reactor takes one or two decades 
    and its kWh is costlier than alternatives

It didn't and doesn't need to be that way. Obviously we need strong regulatory oversight over nuclear power, but a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry.

Also, talking about kWh cost in the short term is... missing a large portion of the point. Burning fossil fuels is only "cheap" if all the long term damage is ignored. Let's talk about how cheap it is once we start truly paying the price for climate change to the tune of billions of lives and many quadrillions of dollars.

> > building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives

> It didn't and doesn't need to be that way [..] a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations [..]

(Alleged over-)regulation is only part of the story.

"analysis, done by a team of researchers at MIT, is remarkably comprehensive. For many nuclear plants, they have detailed construction records, broken out by which building different materials and labor went to, and how much each of them cost. There's also a detailed record of safety regulations and when they were instituted relative to construction. Finally, they've also brought in the patent applications filed by the companies who designed the reactors. The documents describe the motivations for design changes and the problems those changes were intended to solve."[0]

"while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor. And deciding whether they were worthwhile costs would require a detailed analysis of every regulatory change in light of accidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima"

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...

So how are other countries e.g. South Korea building them faster than the US, yet not suffering nuclear accidents?

I presume the problem is not a lack of engineering talent in America.

I think you underestimate how much lobbying the nuclear industry does.

Here's the former head of the US Nuclear regulator talking about how he worked to reduce safety regulations to make it easier to build nuclear plants. Now he thinks no new nuclear power should ever be built: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-oversaw-the-us-nucl...

It stands to reason that the nuclear lobby is out for its bottom line, but let’s not lose perspective on just how devastatingly deadly fossil fuel combustion is by comparison, killing an estimated 8.7 million people per year [1]. That’s 1 in 5 of all deaths globally.

Our perceptions of risk are massively skewed by the (literally) explosive nature of nuclear disasters compared to this silent holocaust to which we’re shockingly normalized.

From Our World in Data [2]:

> Nuclear energy, for example, results in 99.9% fewer deaths than brown coal; 99.8% fewer than coal; 99.7% fewer than oil; and 97.6% fewer than gas. Wind and solar are just as safe.

That’s per unit of energy generated.

Curiously, while most can likely name Chernobyl and Fukushima (perhaps fewer Windscale and Three Mile Island), what of the Banqiao Dam disaster, which killed an estimated 171,000 people the 1970s?

All that said, extrapolating the lethality of nuclear generation to a world with many more nuclear plants is fraught, precisely because there are so few data points.

There’s no escaping the fact that these are incredibly complex and expensive machines, which can fail in unexpected ways, no matter how scrupulously they’re designed to be passively safe — especially when compared to a solar PV park.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...

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

> building a fission reactor takes one or two decades

> and its kWh is costlier than alternatives

> It didn't and doesn't need to be that way. Obviously we need strong regulatory oversight over nuclear power, but a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry.

That is not true, there was an HN submission which broke down the cost of nuclear construction (am on mobile and can't easily find it right now) and cost is largely dominated by construction cost, which to a large degree (>50%) are the same as a regular thermal power plant. Regarding regulations, the nuclear lobby is actually very strong, they even managed to reduce regulations for the steam-generating cycle compared to other power plants (I think this was in the US).

> Also, talking about kWh cost in the short term is... missing a large portion of the point. Burning fossil fuels is only "cheap" if all the long term damage is ignored. Let's talk about how cheap it is once we start truly paying the price for climate change to the tune of billions of lives and many quadrillions of dollars.

But the comparison is not to fossil fuels, the comparison is to renewables. If renewables are cheaper and faster (which is the case) they will enable us to move of fossil sources faster than nuclear, so the overall emitted CO2 is less.

Fuel diversification is important too. That's something Germany seems to have forgotten when they went all in on natural gas.

Not only are the costs comparable to a carbon thermal plant, the generating equipment is identical, and the cooling needs are also identical.

Solution: build nuclear cores as close to existing coal plants as possible, shut the coal plant down, and move everything from the steam boiler to the wires to the nuclear plant.

Repeat until no coal.

The cooling needs on a LWR are actually a bit higher, per unit of electrical power output, because the steam temperature is lower than that of a coal plant. The discrepancy is much larger for combined cycle plants.

> a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry

People keep on parroting this, but could you list what these "incredibly hostile regulations" entail?

The only "new" thing I know of is the requirement in certain places (like in Sweden) to have ICSS, Independent Core Cooling System, to prevent a Fukushima situation, plus to prevent a meltdown caused by what happened at Forsmark Nuclear Plant in Sweden 2006[1]

ICSS isn't that expensive BTW. Vattenfall cited the cost of adding ICSS to their 5 reactors to about 3 billion SEK in 2020. That's about 300 million US dollars with today's exchange rate.[2]

[1]: https://analys.se/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/forsmark-incide...

[2]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Swedish-reactors...

>ICSS isn't that expensive BTW. Vattenfall cited the cost of adding ICSS to their 5 reactors to about 3 billion SEK in 2020. That's about 300 million US dollars with today's exchange rate.

$300m seems pretty expensive to me as a cost to add to what is already the safest energy source in the world by terawatt-hour produced[0]. One-fifth the death rate of rooftop solar. 0.025% as dangerous as oil. Every terawatt-hour of energy a coal power plant produces results in as many deaths as one hundred Fukushima "situations."

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

Rubbish.

Considering a single reactor costs €11-19 billion[1][2] to build in Western Europe currently (Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville (we haven't seen the final bill for that one yet)), an additional 300 million dollars is a drop in the bucket and not the thing that will make the project go from viable to nonviable.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... (final)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan... (projected, not final)

Step 1: Nuclear reactors are so expensive already, additional costs to increase safety barely matter in their overall price! This additional regulation isn't enough to make a viable plant nonviable.

Step 2: Nuclear reactors are so expensive it makes no sense to provision new ones when renewables are just around the corner! Just keep the current coal power plants running while we take another decade to increase solar grid capacity by a few terawatts.

Step 3: Go to step 1.

See also; heap fallacy. Seriously, coal power generation is so bad that if we had to reduce safety regulations to the point that we were having a Chernobyl-level meltdown every month to replace all coal with nuclear plants, we would be significantly better off for it. It's not even close. We could literally completely deregulate safety of nuclear power plants and be safer overall.

(Per the stats I shared earlier, coal power kills 100,000 people per thousand terawatt-hours produced. The world produces roughly 44,000 tWh of coal energy, resulting in 4.4 million deaths per year. Casualty estimates of Chernobyl vary wildly, but even the most pessimistic estimate produced by Greenpeace, avowed anti-nuclear activists that they are, only totals 200,000. Coal power is almost twice as bad as having a Chernobyl every month)

The problem is that the sun is not always shining (and half the year not at the right angle), and wind is not always blowing. Unless a country has access to always-on sources (like sea currents), energy must be stored or things must be burned. Storage is hard and energy intensive to build, and many countries would need a few months worth of storage to never bother about burning stuff again. And that’s _a lot_, you wouldn’t believe the kind of power needed to support some branches of industry, and they won’t shut down in winter of course.

Storage is certainly not harder to build than nuclear power plants. Power-to-Gas is technologically quite straightforward. The research that's currently happening is just to make it cheaper until we have enough renewables for grid-scale storage to make sense. The really hard part of becoming carbon neutral is the sectors other than electricity, e.g. heating and transportation, but nuclear power won't help you there.

Why do you think fission can't help with heating? Heat is one of the by-products of running a reactor.

E.g.: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-power-could-heat-your-h...

https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclea...

Because the problematic part is switching millions and millions of buildings from gas and oil to either heat pumps or district heating, not generating heat or electricity.

Power to gas (incl reverse) is terribly lossy right now.

Surplus renewable electricity is incredibly cheap. Losses matter a lot less than the cost of the infrastructure you need for storage. Batteries have great efficiency, but they're not cheap. We already have a bunch of infrastructure that can handle gas.

If your grid is large enough (and that is already happening in Europe for economic reasons), you have enough geographic distribution to average out variations. There have been studies that showed you could run the US on something like 500% overcapacity with a fully integrated grid using only renewables and no storage.

Moreover nuclear are slow moving, they typically don't load follow, so even with a combined nuclear/renewables you still either need significant overcapacity or some sort of peaker. So you haven't actually solved the variation problem.

Finally, because cost for nuclear is largely dominated by capex (construction cost, both in dollars and CO2 foodprint), not running the nuclear plant as close to capacity as possible will even more increase the price and also reduce the CO2 lifetime emission. In usual comparisons which puts nuclear on par with renewables, nuclear is assumed to run essentially 24/7 while solar/wind are based on some statistical uptime. If we operate a nuclear not close to capacity its lifetime carbon footprint becomes significantly worse.

> Moreover nuclear are slow moving, they typically don't load follow

Which is not entirely true: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...

Even older designs could do load following.

The problem isn't really to what extent nuclear is load-following, but that the economics of nuclear look even worse than they already do if we want to follow the cheapest generator.

To be blunt: if the sun is shining and it's windy, no-one really wants to buy a nuclear plant's output. Not at an agreed fixed price, or possibly at any price.

The idea of nuclear getting paid the same price - or worse, an index-linked price - for the lifetime of the plant, regardless of what the future holds, and even on those sunny and windy days, just seems horrendously anticompetitive.

If nuclear is as necessary, competitive and flexible as some make out, then go right ahead and build your plant(s). Just don't expect taxpayers to underwrite anything.

> if we want to follow the cheapest generator.

Energy isn't just about generation

> If nuclear is as necessary, competitive and flexible as some make out, then go right ahead and build your plant(s). Just don't expect taxpayers to underwrite anything.

By the same logic taxpayers shouldn't underwrite any renewables: they are significantly slower than nuclear, and have literally zero base load capacity.

> By the same logic taxpayers shouldn't underwrite any renewables: they are significantly slower than nuclear, and have literally zero base load capacity.

The cost for offshore wind projects has fallen so fast in the UK that the many of the latest projects don't need subsidies, see this report from Imperial College (London)[0], in fact they'll be paying the government, see this article from Bloomberg.[1]

I'm pretty sceptical about the phrase 'base load', when it comes up, such as in a HN discussion[2] from a last week, it seems to be used to describe wanting to choose slow and/or expensive power plants.

EDIT: See also this[3] recent HN discussion, in which it was pointed out "California has put emphasis on renewables and if the nuclear power station isn't guaranteed to provide base load then it's too expensive to operate"

[0] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/200353/offshore-wind-power-c... [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-13/high-powe... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32152588 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31610996

> The cost for offshore wind projects has fallen so fast in the UK that the many of the latest projects don't need subsidies

I'll have to check that. Sensational news usually omit quite a few important details.

> I'm pretty sceptical about the phrase 'base load', when it comes up, such as in a HN discussion[2] from a last week, it seems to be used to describe wanting to choose slow and/or expensive power plants.

No. It means that wind and solar literally produce zero output when there's no wind or there's no sun.

However, life goes on: trains run, homes are being heated, businesses operate, factories produce goods. This is base load.

So, to cover a wind farm or a solar farm that produces inadequate power you need to get that power from somewhere.

Where from?

And this is the question that renewables enthusiasts just brush off as not important.

"We can store energy". No. We can't. Not in the amounts required.

"We just build more". How much more? Does this "more" remain cheap then? Yea, you can transmit it from afar, but it's no mean task in itself. And not cheap either.

But sure. "It's all about keeping slow power plants". What the hell does "slow" even mean in this context, when we're talking about wind/solar which can't even be properly used in load following precisely because they are extremely slow.

Building wind and solar to 500% overcapacity sounds like a great waste of resources and space though.

And makes nuclear look a lot more cost-competitive by comparison.

But currently solar/wind are ~3x cheaper than nuclear and falling rapidly. So the 500% overcapacity would likely in the end cost the same as 100% capacity of nuclear. However, with nuclear you need at least 200% capacity as well (maintenance, hot days, not being able to load follow fast enough). So which one is the waste of resources?

Long-distance transmission is at least as slow to build as nuclear, at least in the US. There are projects that have foundered for decades.

> building a fission reactor takes one or two decades

This is not universally true. Looking at South Korea's construction times for example[1], you'll see that it's averaging between 5-7 years per reactor, all the way into the 2000s and 2010s. Japan shows similar numbers[2], and they're currently in the process of restarting their nuclear investments following the accident at Fukushima Daiichi. Same story for China[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#B...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

I feel you are cherry-picking those South Korean numbers. If you look at the latest ones that started construction in 2009-2012, it's taken 10 years (and some are still not started). That's "one decade". Extrapolating the construction time inflation, you could imagine any future developments will take longer still.

> What's the point?

Energy density.

Oh look, a metric no one cares about.

> Fusion doesn't have this same battle to overcome.

Ha ha, Greenpeace has already per-emptively decided they hate fusion too.

Greenpeace gives no shit about Emperors having no clothes, so they've been pointing out the grave economic barriers to DT fusion, and also the implications of fusion for proliferation. And they're entirely right about that.

The issue when you say let’s build X00 new LWR is just cost vs benefit. Something like 5 Trillion in additional nuclear subsidies might slow down climate change a low single digit percentage over the next 30 years. This relates not just to the high cost of nuclear but also the delay between deciding to build nuclear and actually getting low carbon energy from a nuclear reactor.

Spend 1/4th that on solar or wind subsidies and you get vastly more carbon free energy sooner without any concerns for politically inconvenient disasters. 1 nuclear reactor can be quite safe, but 500 of them is 500 times the risk. Even a largely non issue Fukushima style disaster is still a major political and economic issue.

Fission is quite useful, and I hope it continues to provide largely carbon free energy into the future. It’s just not a great use of the resources required to make a real difference.

The outlook for Fusion over the next few decades doesn’t look very good, but it’s also received vastly less investment. It’s IMO a low odds but low cost bet that might pay off but probably won’t.

People have issues with really visualizing and understanding order of magnitudes, I get it.

> Spend 1/4th that on solar or wind subsidies and you get vastly more carbon free energy

Have you done the math, or are you just making that figure up? One single LWR generates from 1GW onwards. Do you know how much solar you need to generate the same amount of power? And that's disregarding the obvious issues with non-constant energy output.

Plus - solar and wind, if you factor in the energy required to manifacture the components necessary for their operation, have negative EROI. https://energyeducation.se/wind-and-solar-energy-are-neither...

I have literally no idea why people think that solar and wind are a solution to the energy problem. It's like nobody has actually looked into the math and said "wow this makes me feel good so I'll support it". Let me repeat it, solar and wind have _negative_ EROI. If you invest in solar and wind, you're net losing energy.

> 1 nuclear reactor can be quite safe, but 500 of them is 500 times the risk

Modern nuclear is exceptionally safe. Europe is switching to freaking _coal_ in an effort not to freeze this winter. Statistically, they're killing hundreds of times more people than if they switched to nuclear at the right time. They're shutting down most of their nuclear for unknown reasons as well.

> Have you done the math, or are you just making that figure up?

Ran the numbers, people are installing solar without any subsidies. If you look at what subsides could achieve for grid scale solar it gets crazy.

Also, there is no way solar and wind can have negative EROI simply on a cost basis. There is simply no way for an unsubsidized energy source to have a negative EROI and be the cheapest energy source. You believe there is an option for sub 1c/kWh power to be supplying energy to crease that equipment and nothing fits the bill.

500 is 1-(1-risk)^500 the risk

... which is much larger than 500x, approaching near-certainty, for any non-negligible value of unit risk.

This isn’t one of those cases where the only thing you care about is if something happens or not as humanity would need to deal with and thus pay for every nuclear accident. As there is no discount if it happens twice vs once every reactor is an independent risk. Thus, 500 reactors is 500x the risk.

You might argue multiple major disasters might result in more reactors being shut down as knee jerk reaction, but shutting down 500 additional reactors is 5x more expensive than shutting down 100.

> Still, I do feel that some fusion hype is partially due to people not giving fission enough credit though

I wonder if this is more a marketing thing. Fission has a bad rep so people try to evade it by getting funding for fusion or SMRs (I know this is fission too) instead. Which people don't associate with classical nuclear reactor tech. Even though it's probably better to just put that money towards a new AP1000 from a cost perspective.

It's extremely unlikely any more AP1000s will be built in the US. All projects that were in the development pipeline have been cancelled due to the spectacular financial failures that Summer and Vogtle have been.

The only way it could happen is if the feds took on construction risk.

That's a fair point, I don't know if there are any other fission reactor candidates that have a better shot at succeeding? Maybe SMRs are the only possible candidates even though the economics ($/kWh) are likely worse, if they can build them on time then at least we're working with a predictable outcome.

>Honestly, I don't understand why we can't do both.

Because we're been doing neither for 40 years.

And, money is fungible. A dollar spent on X is not spent on Y.

This is not a difficult concept.

It seems to be, because there isn't a fixed amount of money.

Money isn't the problem. Manpower and materials are the problem.

Spending manpower and materials on X cannot be spent on Y. Manpower and materials are not fungible - at least not in the nuclear space where requirements are very high.

Do you really need it explained that money represents manpower and materials?

The manpower and materials that go into nuke construction are mostly the same that go into any civil engineering construction: pouring concrete and forming steel. Concrete and steel and work on them diverted to nuke construction is unavailable for anything else.

> The cost of climate change clearly far outweighs the cost of nuclear plants and waste.

Um, yes until you factor in failure rates due to incompetence + natural failure. Chernobyl, look it up, massive cost, massive loss of land, death/cancer rate of all exposed nearly 100%.

Until you can solve the "corrupt bureaucrat cuts corners he doesn't understand" problem, and also demonstrate that the failure of a single reactor doesn't cascade and cause every reactor to blow (if you increase the density of reactor distribution a single fallout has the potential to cascade to every reactor).

I remain skeptical about the fuel waste issue being solved, I've heard that a number of times and its not exactly been true, what is usually meant is that the fuel can be re-used somewhat indefinitely, after being repurposed in special containment facilities, not that the spent fuel safety issue is resolved.

And, it won't even solve the climate change issue - even after going 100% electricity and/or renewable fuels, we still have a considerable chemical infrastructure to resolve, and we still have the heat waste issue to resolve (making things electrical doesn't solve energy and chemical expenditure affecting weather patterns, albeit it is better than pumping CO2), an infrastructure which will need to be utilized to create said nuclear reactors.

Climate change will slowly roast us all to death, a nuclear failure will, instantly fry us all to molten pulp, I know which one I prefer.

> Death rate 100%

Pretty sure the death rate is 100% for exposure to literally anything given enough time...

> Climate change will slowly roast us all to death, a nuclear failure will, instantly fry us all to molten pulp, I know which one I prefer.

If you believe that even the worst nuclear accident at power plant will "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" in any appreciable range (while climate change is worldwide), the you are mistaken

> death/cancer rate of all exposed nearly 100%.

It is completely untrue. Even among https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators it is not true.

> If you believe that even the worst nuclear accident at power plant will "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" in any appreciable range (while climate change is worldwide), the you are mistaken

I am not wrong, in a world dotted with miniature fission reactors, as the most extreme pro-fission people would like to favor. If you can build one in space, and it powers the whole earth, that's obviously a very different story than building them every city block.

I am also not wrong about the effects of radiation on the human body, when used as a bomb nuclear weapons literally melt people into goo, ofc with a reactor there are various safeguards but the thing causing the flesh-melt is still occurring, so maybe less instantaneous melt and more gradual boils and blisters leading to severe internal cancers as your cascade of nuclear reactors around the city all blow in a beautiful chain reaction...

> It is completely untrue. Even among https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators it is not true.

It's not untrue if you define exposed, not to be disingenuous, but those actually exposed to the reactor meltdown, did not survive. Those experiencing second hand exposure in e.g. the town, obviously did not all drop dead, but had increased risk of cancer, death, and those globally exposed, well many fewer dead or at risk of cancer.

So unfortunately when speaking so imprecisely it actually is true, just not in the way you imagine. Even your wikipedia article admits among the liquidators the death rate was almost at least 20% by some estimates, and I would presume these people are wearing some protective equipment, so calling them "exposed" is somewhat disingenous in and of itself...

I'm sorry. I'm probably more antinuclear than you but a lot of the things you are saying are just ignorant.

For example nuclear bombs melting flesh is because of the extreme heat, nothing that is unique to the nuclear process.

You'd be a more effective advocate for anti-nuclear viewpoints by learning some stuff first.

Ok, well would you mind linking some good starting materials?

And I think you maybe are more ignorant than you care to admit as well:

"is that a very appreciable fraction of the energy liberated goes into radiant heat and light"

https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/med/med_ch...

To me that doesn't sound like "oh man the temperature in the room just went up", more like "oh man I just got a really bad sunburn".

> is that a very appreciable fraction of the energy liberated goes into radiant heat and light

That's exactly what I said in my previous comment:

For example nuclear bombs melting flesh is because of the extreme heat, nothing that is unique to the nuclear process.

You see exactly the same "flash burn" characteristics from other very hot weapons eg thermobaric explosives.

The unique thing about nuclear bombs is their scale and the fallout afterwards (both of which are horrific). That "melting flesh" thing is caused by the extreme heat, not by some magic "it's nuclear" thing.

Heat is not light, that is not exactly what you said. Sorry. You didn't even mention light.

Physically as well as "mechanically", I suppose, they are very different things. Heat cannot travel at the speed of light, light can. Light can impart heat, but it is a partical-wave with various properties, heat is a general statistical statement about a set of particalls. They are not the same thing at all.

Now, as for how a sunburn works, it's not about heat. The reason you wear sunblock even on a temperate day (cold, even) but with lots of sun, is because UV light, not heat, burns your skin.

So, yeah, actually, this is different from a pure thermobaric explosive, if you want to get technical.

Now I understand you want to argue about whether "melting flesh" is unique to nuclear bombs - I never said it was. The output of a nuclear weapon, or reactor, is pretty darn unique, compared to a traditional heat thermal heat source. I don't think I ever even implied that there was some magical property of nuclear weapons which makes them "melt flesh".

You claim to be anti-nuclear yourself but you seem more interested in classifying the possible things which could be flesh melting, and/or you seem to have little to no knowledge of actual physics, thus I have extreme trouble taking you at your word.

Heat and light are exactly the same thing.

Heat is just longer wavelength electro magnetic radiation than visible light.

UV is shorter wavelength EM radiation, so same thing (not quite sure why we are talking about sunburn though).

It outputs a bunch of other EM radiation too. That's what an EMP explosion is - one desiged to maximize EM radiation in frequencies likely to destroy electronic equipment.

I sort of assumed people on HN knew this.

If you use unexpected definition of "exposed" then it would be better to mention it directly...

Yeah, obviously direct exposure to core kills. In the same way being pulled through hydropower turbine kills, and ending in furnace of gas/coal/wood heated power plant will kill you.

Nuclear power still has vastly lower death ratio per produced energy than other ways generating power anyway.

> I am not wrong, in a world dotted with miniature fission reactors, as the most extreme pro-fission people would like to favor.

You would be still wrong. Building atom bomb factories doubling as power plants (Chernobyl design) in every city, and then deliberately triggering such catastrophe in every single one still is not getting this result.

With miniature fission reactors - also not.

You would not get "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" even in case of deliberate use of all nuclear weapons by omnicidal world government trying to murder as many people as possible.

Perhaps I am wrong to the degree of which we are doomed in various scenarios, but I am not wrong that serious effects would occur.

My concern is - catastrophic chaining failure of nuclear plants, which I must assume you would not think would be a good thing, and would cause 'grave public harm', better? Not arguing over exactly how flesh melted the general populous is.

If you remove "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" and replace with "fry us to molten pulp", that may be more true, I don't know that the general public will care much if it is 10% of the populous or 100% of the populous who is getting fried by radiation burns and subjected to carcinogenic materials which we have no methods to contain, effectively it might as well be everyone.

> hydropower turbine kills, and ending in furnace of gas/coal/wood heated power plant

Sure, but we can drain water, and we can put out fires (water, flame retardants). We can manage these systems. Nobody but the most crazy out-of-touch pro-nuclear person is going to try to claim that we can directly control neutrons, free particles, or the half lives of deadly carcinogens, or that we can filter them from our water supplies.

I am primarily complaining about claim that everyone could die.

That would not happen even in an outright full scale nuclear war.

Exact way of dying (starvation, frying, flash frying, whatever) is not so important to me.

> catastrophic chaining failure of nuclear plants

That is also not going to happen. Even misdesigned soviet atomic bomb factory operating in insanely unsafe mode by incompetents managed to avoid this.

> Nobody but the most crazy out-of-touch pro-nuclear person is going to try to claim that we can directly control neutrons, free particles, or the half lives of deadly carcinogens, or that we can filter them from our water supplies.

The same applies to flood from collapsed dam or emitted CO2 or radiation emitted by coal power plants.

So how do you think that we should solve energy storage? Both batteries and dams are dangerous and can lead to disasters. Dams failing have killed way more people than nuclear ever has.

Batteries are dangerous? What do you mean by that?

> Dams failing have killed way more people than nuclear ever has.

And this solely due to one incident under communism where damn was not maintained.

Well the 2900 people who died in the Johnstown dam failure immediatly come to mind.

But its much, much worse than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure

If had the same risk management mindset for dams as we do for nuclear, we would also be banning hydroelectic.

Well first of all energy storage, is not production, but as you asked:

1) Reduced need for energy storage. Right to repair for everything, write code that is efficient and lower power, distributed systems which don't require complex centralized systems to run. Taxes on unused compute cycles to help create incentives for this, perhaps.

2) For actual energy storage, something like the sand heat system recently put into use in Scandinavia, or the mechanical earth dams (store energy in potential energy mass, less dangerous than an actual water dam, a lot easier to build). For immediate electric storage at scale you can do e.g. saline water storage tanks which hold mild electric charge, who knows maybe there is some inert chemistry which could be devised for a safer transportable version of a lithium ion battery...

3) For energy production, I am a long time advocate of geothermal. There's no real downside, besides digging holes and I guess maybe a well collapse, but you're limited to loss of whatever is in the whole/immediate surrounding in the case of a cave in, there are no engineering problems to solve except pumping water around, which is a well known task. Solar/wind for ships, airplanes, space vehicles, electric/hydrogen for storage/consumption scenarios where the grid is not accessible (remote locations e.g. the poles, alaska, siberia, African/Asian planes)

> write code that is efficient and lower power, distributed systems which don't require complex centralized systems to run.

huh?

It's marginal compared to the other power expenses to be sure, but computing is another rising power cost. Besides my AC, and cooking, I don't have any regular power expenditures other than digital devices, so it seems reasonable to me to want to optimize power expenditure there.

Regarding the distributed vs centralized, the reasoning is large data centers are inefficient and could be replaced mostly with local, low power systems which are barely on at all, versus constant-on, constant-ready server rack systems.

This is a really lazy response, but given the possibility that you genuinely don't understand the gp: Writing better software and reducing the (currently massive) waste of energy on enterprise bullshit and cryptomining would have a meaningful impact on international energy usage, and so help climate change.

> mechanical earth dams (store energy in potential energy mass, less dangerous than an actual water dam, a lot easier to build)

a lot easier to build?

This claim seems wrong, given that pumped-storage hydroelectricity is in actual use, when this is purely theoretical.

"mechanical earth dams" gives info about water dams - is it existing even as a theoretic design?

https://www.energyvault.com/gravity

Its a company with as I understand it proven designs.

Besides, the concept is trivial and applicable and replicable by almost anyone. I don't understand why there is so much skepticism around these things...

Nuclear energy as a concept is trivial. There are a lot of details between "concept is trivial" and "it's practical at scale"

> Besides, the concept is trivial and applicable and replicable by almost anyone.

Has anyone made one operating at major scale? And comparable to say serious pumped storage? At their page I see only "demonstration unit".

I suspect that either it is not solved, expensive or not trivial. And not replicable or there is nothing to replicate or not worth replicating.

For comparison https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrownia_Por%C4%85bka-%C5%B... can operate at 500MW for 4 hours, was build in 1979 and is a normal pumped storage battery (large enough to be classified, operated and treated as a power plant).

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