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Comment by aunty_helen | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, if they did go ahead we would've had decades less coal burning and potentially could've provided electricity cheap enough in combination with hydro and renewables that would've seen some big industry shift away from burning coal.

NZ has a very green power grid but it's not perfect and suffers from reliability issues dependent on snowfall to fill the hydro lakes. Nuclear would have and still could provide a lot more security in that area.

I'm hoping NZ sees the light and accepts small nuclear as a decent method of going to 100% green sources (currently it's 85%)

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> if they did go ahead we would've had decades less coal burning

If they did go ahead without safety measures, and had an incident, the plant would likely be shut down, and then you have the domino effect that Fukishima had (e.g., Germany shutting down all their plants). Nuclear can be viable when both proper safety can be ensured economically, and when that surety can be shared by its voting population

> If they did go ahead without safety measures, and had an incident, the plant would likely be shut down

Three Mile Island had two close calls. The first was the reactor was only 30-60 minutes from going into complete meltdown. The second was potentially using a faulty crane to remove the lid of the reactor vessel. Either one of those would have made large areas of dense urban area unlivable.

When was this crane thing? It would have been long after the reactor had reached cold shutdown, so what exactly was the accident it was supposed to have almost caused?

Not the OP but the crane incident was shortly after the first incident. The higher ups wanted to use the polar crane to lift a bunch of radioactive debris out of the core that almost melted down. At least one of the workers (Rick Parks) ended up whistleblowing over it because the crane was the same one that was there during the incident and most likely had taken damage. He was concerned the crane would fail while lifting the radioactive debris out (around 1000 lbs of it) and fall back onto the core. Check out the Netflix document Meltdown: Three mile Island for more info.

This is also in Moral Mazes somewhere, if you prefer a written summary.

Yeah, that "shortly after"... the reactor top wasn't lifted off until FIVE YEARS after the accident.

So I ask again: just what horrible public-relevant accident is supposed to have nearly happened here? I can't imagine anything that would have caused anything catastrophic. The lid falling back onto the reactor vessel wouldn't be that.

Sorry for the late response. The fear was that the crane would fail and drop the debris back into the core and set off a nuclear explosion.

They added large amounts of borate to the water before opening the top. There was no way it was going to go critical (and if it had, it would at best have been a steam explosion, not a nuclear bomb, as the chain reaction if it could have occurred at all would have been with slow thermal neutrons.)

Why is nuclear judged by near misses while coal pollutes like crazy daily and causes real lung damage and no one bats an eye?

* real death.

Quick googling shows wildly different numbers, but the lowest study in top results says 1 million per year from coal alone.

All global warming + pollution is way higher. One study estimated 1 in 5 deaths. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...

Because coal is not an alternative today, renewables are and they have miniscule external pollution in relation to everything else.

No, renewables are not an alternative to fossil fuels. That’s why natural gas and coal fire plants are still being cranked out today.

Seems to work just fine? This will of course penetrate down to less ideal locations as costs continue to decline.

> South Australia is at the vanguard of the global energy transition, having transformed its energy system from 1% to over 60% renewable energy in just over 15 years.

> By 2025/2026, the Australian Energy Market Operator forecasts this could rise to approximately 85%.

> South Australia’s aspiration is to achieve 100% net renewables by 2030. In 2021, South Australia met 100% of its operational demand from renewable resources on 180 days (49%).

https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/industry/modern-energy/le...

Your examples don’t support your point. 60% renewable isn’t enough and they aren’t even into the hardest part of replacing the base load at that level.

> South Australia’s aspiration is to achieve 100% net renewables by 2030

That link you sent is bleak. They just now are hitting the point where renewable generation causes excess energy during peak solar hours sometimes. They have no concrete plans to store at the scale required to actually get through the troughs. They are just now beginning to kick the tires on storage projects which is where much of the southwestern US was a decade ago.

1 to 60% was possible in 15 years. All the while we have had these cost curves for wind and solar. [1] So you're saying the last 40% is going to be completely impossible and wreck the grid?

Like, I just don't understand your negativity. Projecting to reach 85% renewable penetration in ~3 years and it is a bleak outlook? You're looking for a magic finger snap and it is 100% tomorrow?

[1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/451886/grphx_lcoe-09.png

>So you're saying the last 40% is going to be completely impossible and wreck the grid?

Without massive storage, yes. The 60% it picked up is the easy part of the demand that follows the renewable production. The last 40% is 95%+ of the difficult work.

The difference here is making a rocket that gets to space vs one that achieves orbit. They seem similar but they aren’t even in the same league.

>Like, I just don't understand your negativity.

It’s not negativity, it’s what has happened in every country that is a decade or more ahead of Australia here. Australia is not magic, it has nighttimes and slow winds like every other place on the planet. This problem has plagued everyone at the head of the technology curve here and there still isn’t a solution. What do you think Australia will do differently?

The natural disaster was responsible for killing people, not the nuclear meltdown... maybe if we had been consistently building nuclear since the 60s we wouldn't be in this global warming catastrophe? Obviously speculation, but I'm curious what our global CO2 levels would be if all the major industrialized nations transitioned to 100% nuclear Over the last 60 years. Anyone happen to have some charts?

The plant couldn’t deal with an electricity outage for 24h.

An outage that was caused by something that, through a rare confluence of events, also destroyed their outage-backup-plan. The plant could have easily dealt with most power outages.

Not to say there isn't a lesson to be learned, obviously, but to say the plant couldn't deal with an outage is ingenuous at minimum.

Battery backup was good for 8h. Seems pretty risky to me, there are many scenarios thinkable where a power outage for more than 8h could occur.

For example some natural disaster, which across ubiquitously deployed nuclear would occur every day somewhere on earth.

>there are many scenarios thinkable where a power outage for more than 8h could occur.

Sure, and they thought of them, which is why they had generators as well as batteries.

> but to say the plant couldn't deal with an outage is ingenuous at minimum.

Did you mean "disingenuous"? "Ingenuous" means lacking in guile or craftiness. "Disingenuous" means having the intent to deceive, and is used much more often.

The majority of the man-made CO2 in the atmosphere today comes from power generation IIRC. A lot also comes from transportation, but less than power generation.

If what you say took place, along with the solar and wind power advances that happened, we'd at least be looking at a lot longer warming runway than we are today.

I feel like the biggest benefit of small nuclear is that it can be put anywhere and you don’t have to build extremely costly transmission infrastructure. Just dot these things around. It surely isn’t cost-effective enough for the first 85% or whatever of a state’s needs, but for that last mile problem? Sounds good.

I don’t think dotting nuclear reactors around everywhere would be politically very acceptable. Each plant will also require some level of staffing, operational and security staff. Seems more likely that small modular reactors would just be deployed in large batches to lower the fixed costs, and accept the transmission losses.

The NuScale design requires 3 people on shifts to operate a 12 reactor fleet.

I would be a bit worried about physical security with lots of small plants. What do you think? I suppose in theory there is nothing preventing having similar levels of physical security from today's large plants.

Up to 12 x 60 MWe per station reactors means 720 MWe, as much as a CANDU plant. Yet it looks like a bunch of warehouses on the outside because the reactors are stored in underground water pools. I guess you'd need similar security as for any power plant. The NRC also requires that all new reactors designs post-9/11 are able to withstand impact with a commercial airplane.

https://www.ans.org/news/article-1913/first-steps-into-a-new...

Bit of an aside: Nuclear plant security should not be comparable to fossil fuel plant security, it should be much much tighter.

Yes agreed, given the risks of meltdown or the theft of radioactive material I would think security should be much more important.

Radiation alone provides security. The plant diagram already has two fences with coresponding checkpoints. One needs to stop potential looters, so basically checkpoits with a guard each and a patrol vehicle with a team of two. Make it armed guards if you're in the US where everyone and their grandmother owns not one but several firearms. That plus the usual access cards and CCTV. This isn't a military nuclear weapons lab, it's a civilian power facility.

I'd still feel safer with the number of armed guards being nearer the 'nuclear weapons lab' end of the scale than the 'power facility' end.

The electricity grid does not have a last mile problem for supply. And just putting them anywhere will just raise costs. Better to put multiple units next to an existing substation on the backbone. Then those units can supply electricity to potentially millions, not just the city at the end of the last mile.

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