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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

I think this is an area where industrial policy should play a serious role.

I am firmly against a technology with such a unequal downside/upside ratio. It's not that nuclear fission is inherently unsafe, it's just that every reactor needs to be playing it's A game every day.

We need to be lucky every day, mother nature only needs to be lucky once.

Maybe, maybe we can treat these as giant durcell batteries and use them for five years then seal it in concrete on site. But that does not seem to be the play here - so all the recycling and transport and handling just scales up - and it costs to be on your A game. The US military might afford this. but even they will probably want to run down the costs in the next few decades.

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> I am firmly against a technology with such a unequal downside/upside ratio.

I'm very curious what you're basing this opinion on.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

> it's just that every reactor needs to be playing it's A game every day.

That is not necessarily true of modern reactor designs. Reactors can be designed so that neglect by the operators, loss of coolant and other failures result in the reaction passively coasting to a halt.

This is the big difference between most of the large deployed reactors and the modern designs.

Which leads me to an idea: a power plant divided into four parts, where each part starts construction on 1/3 the eventual power using the newest designs every decade. They run for 30 years. Then deconstruct and rebuild the last one with the newest design.

This would incentivize a continuous market for new designs over the next century.

"Deconstruct" is doing a lot of work here. Nobody knows how to take apart fission reactors promptly after they are shut down at the end of their economic life. All we know how to do is wait many years for activity levels to decline, then incrementally remove materials starting with the least contaminated, which itself takes decades. The materials can only be recycled into other nuclear facilities, which means that essentially none of this material has been recycled, because nobody is building.

Many of the supposed guarantees are valid only in the absence of water and/or oxygen intrusion into the core, which are huge caveats here on planet Earth.

> it's just that every reactor needs to be playing it's A game every day.

What if you start by assuming failure, and then account for that by operating your reactors under millions of gallons of emergency cooling water? That is NuScale's approach.

Overall what I understand of NuScale's approach seems to account for most everything that can go wrong. But what happens if there is a natural disaster that causes much of that water to leak away quickly? Is there a failsafe for that as well?

What natural disaster could quickly drain a "lake" lined with stainless steel? All that water needs somewhere to go.

I assume a straightforward geological study would prevent events like https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/22/man-dies-after...

Straightforward studies are often not done. And, often done then ignored.

Dams collapse mainly for this reason, and those, while killing many people and destroying whole cities, do not leave the whole region uninhabitable.

It is much more difficult to build a dam than a water-filled hole.

I don't know, but I suspect we will find out if we end up having these "lakes" distributed all over the world

>It's not that nuclear fission is inherently unsafe, it's just that every reactor needs to be playing it's A game every day.

The second half of your sentence is literally arguing that fission is inherently unsafe. Which is it?

You have two choices:

1. Fission is inherently unsafe: then why do the numbers contradict you?

2. Fission is not inherently unsafe: then what's the problem?

> We need to be lucky every day, mother nature only needs to be lucky once.

Sounds more like a slogan than an argument

It's also a terrible attitude to an engineering and operations challenge. What is this dark box of 'luck'? We know the potential concerns, and can design and act accordingly.

"they're structured in a way to allow passive safety, where no operator actions are necessary to shut the reactor down if problems occur."

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