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Comment by bad_alloc | Hacker News Reader

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics.

Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happens, like in the case of the stolen solar power plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokmak_Solar_Energy).

View on HN

Hydroelectric dams typically cause even more damage when they fail, but I rarely see people worrying about whether using them for power will lead to war-time issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure

Of course, the Geneva Convention bans attacking dams, just like it bans attacking nuclear power plants.

The pollution from burning coal has already killed more people than nuclear disasters conceivably could.

If we could use only wind and solar power to fully replace fossil fuels and hydro, that could be a reasonable argument...

But it seems unrealistic to get enough energy without using some higher-density sources of energy, whether that's hydro or nuclear or oil, and if we're picking based on which one causes the least death, even accounting for wars and failures, nuclear seems to be a head and shoulder above the rest.

The primary thing that seems to be driving using coal plants and not using nuclear is purely monetary cost: nuclear plants take a huge up-front investment, coal plants already exist, and wind/solar can be transitioned to gradually with less up-front cost. The talk about nuclear's "danger" to me seems, quite plausibly, to be a post-facto justification based on not wanting to put up the money.

You should note that this is more than a theoretical concern. The world spent months fretting about Mosul dam in Iraq, not that many years ago:

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/12/11/mosul-dam-coll...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/a-bigger-probl...

Until we live in a world where we can micro-generate terawatts of power on a fully distributed, dynamic electrical grid -- if that's even possible -- the only practical technologies we have for satisfying our hunger for energy involve concentrated areas of high potential energy. Big energy, big target.

The other issue with solar/wind of course being that it’s not a suitable electricity source for base load on a grid :-/

If one more reactor goes down nuclear isn’t either in your country. Germany has to run their load balancing gas plants right now to fix your nuclear fever dreams.

And what is the probability of a reactor going down unexpectedly versus a weather event that causes renewable sources to stop producing?

I think we learned the answer to that question last winter down in Texas.

You back up the renewables with hydrogen-burning combined cycle plants.

A combined cycle plant costs around $1/W. A nuclear power plant costs around $10/W.

Why do you want to spend so much more money than you have to, just so you can split atoms?

France currently runs its nuclear plants at 60% due to maintanance and heat. In the last years the amount of times they had to shut down a nuclear power plant due to to warm cooling water has increased. Given where global warming is going that will happen more and more.

Texan politicians didn't miss a chance to blame wind power for the outages. Unfortunately, those initial lies are still circulating. The primary cause was that the pipes supplying natural gas froze. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...

The frozen pipes were a problem specifically because the wind farms weren’t producing.

Replace the wind farms with nuclear power and the problem goes away.

Of course it is, with suitable storage. And probably cheaper than nuclear for that.

https://model.energy/

I don't really want wind turbines and solar panels to cover the whole planet. I used that to calculate some numbers for canada, and we'd need about 64k average offshore wind turbines, and 3200 square kilometers of solar farms.

Canada is comprised of 9,984,670 km^2. I don't think that your 3200 km^2 is going to make that much of an impact.

It's a whole 0.5% of the area of farmland in Canada. Think of the children!

> Hydroelectric dams typically cause even more damage when they fail, but I rarely see people worrying about whether using them for power will lead to war-time issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure

I believe the reason people worry less about hydroelectric dam failures is because, if they fail, they do not leave behind a contaminated area. Besides, it's just water; many people are used to floods caused by heavy rain, and the danger feels similar. In fact, hydroelectric dams can even help prevent (or contain) flooding, so it's the opposite of causing damage in that case. Of course, we're not talking about tailings dams, which do leave behind a trail of contamination when they fail.

(An interesting case is the failure of a tailings dam many years ago which flooded the Rio Doce with pollution, with that flood being mostly stopped by a hydroelectric dam downriver. The hydroelectric dam contained the damage instead of causing it.)

Rio Doce was 43.7 million cubic metres and 18 deaths.

If someone blows up Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, it'll be about 18e9 m3, hundreds of thousands dead, wholesale destruction of everything downstream, shutdown of every energy plant that uses the resevoir for cooling, not to mention the hydroelectic station, and untold damage when winds blow the exposed sediment all over the steppe. Which is one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world.

So? This Kakhovka dam is a legitimate military target as the last remaining supply route for russian troops in/around Kherson.

Not a dam, but such a military strategy has already happened and was extremely foolish.

Intentionally breaching the dikes of the Yellow River killed nearly a million people, displaced several million more, and was a contributing factor to people turning towards the Chinese Communists and away from the KMT.

> This Kakhovka dam is a legitimate military target

Not under the Geneva Convention "Works and installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population." https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...

And what would be the consequences should, say, Russia attack, say, the Kakhovka dam? Consequences, that is, for the attacker?

More sanctions? Direct military action against a major (or any) nuclear power? Condemnation and isolation for decades or longer?

My parent was saying that it was a legitimate target. I agree that if Russia decides to give up on the Geneva convention our options aren't great.

You know, Geneva Convention can't divert a bomb.

Couple of 1000lb bombs misplaced, some confusion and you can't stop it, only watch. Has to be a very unfortunate hit, but shit happens.

Compared to that, the Zaporoshya nuclear plant will just shut down as designed even if hit in all its reactors; release maybe a week's worth radiation, completely harmless, and then sit still. And it's just upstream.

Think about it.

So-called 'green energy' bears so much more hazards.

After thousands of war crimes identified, Russians have let crystal clear that they piss on the Geneva Convention.

They have violated yet the Geneva convention (and its laws that oblige to hummanitary treatment of civils in a war) countless times in a few months, and at a level rarely seen before.

There's a dam in the US that's an even bigger issue if it were to go.

> many people are used to floods caused by heavy rain, and the danger feels similar.

I don't know what "people feel", but the reality of a large dam that is blown up is more like a tsunami than a normal flood. If it hits a city, casualties can easily reach the 10s or 100s of thousands, instantly.

In a way, an upstream dam is a health hazard for anyone in the area that might be flooded that should be concerning at the same level as living in an area that has had some nuclear contamination.

For a busted dam to destroy a city, the city necessarily would have been built on land that was literally underwater until before the dam.

This isn’t common, to say the least.

This presumes the gigantic water mass in the dam would stay within the downstream river banks when released.

Water is not that polite...

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

This is not true.

Rivers are often dammed to create an artificial body of water that can be used for power generation. You are storing water from the river when it has a high flow rate, in order to be able to generate power when needed.

There is nothing that requires the area downstream from the dam to have been previously underwater.

> I believe the reason people worry less about hydroelectric dam failures is because, if they fail, they do not leave behind a contaminated area

They very easily could, especially if they wipe out a chemical plant, a dump site, or a number of other things.

Maybe look for the Vajont dam disaster, to see what could be

I guess there's also the argument that in case of dam failure, most people don't live to tell the tale, so it does not stay in the news for a long time.

In case of nuclear incident, actual death may be lower but the affected people will keep being concerned about health issues and complain (rightfuly so) about the necessary relocation, which makes for stronger staying power in the news.

Hydroelectric dams actively save lives by reducing flooding. It’s the only power source with net negative death rates and as such doesn’t see the same kind of pushback from disasters.

Okay, but wouldn't a hydroelectric dam encourage people to build in areas that would be otherwise unsafe, thus putting them at risk of a terrorist attack on the dam?

That’s tricky as people have a shocking propensity to build in flood plains either way and dams only mitigate flooding rather than prevent it. I personally doubt that many people are going to change their mind because the location they want to build their home likely floods every 90 years vs every 30.

Bill a friend of mine built a large addition on a house which had flooded twice while he had been living there, once actually reaching the second story. In his mind it’s picture perfect 99.9% of the time so what’s an inconvenience every few decades. In the end he died before the next flood, but now there is a nice house in a flood plain.

This isn’t reserved to individuals, companies didn’t abandon large areas of NYC after the last flood. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/flood-hazard-ma...

I think the economic decision making eventually trickles down from banks and insurance companies who actually do the math themselves and charge building-owners/mortgage-owners competitively. It's sort of an continuous invisible hand.

At least for Bill he didn’t get a loan to build the addition or any insurance to cover flood damage.

So such trickle down just shifts who builds in such areas but it doesn’t prevent people from living or building in them.

This is one of the few good arguments against nuclear, especially large installations that produce a huge percentage of a region's power.

Even if you can design it in such a way that an external attack is very unlikely to cause a meltdown, it's a juicy and easy target for an adversary to cripple your electricity production. A few dozen well placed missiles might be all you need to take an entire nation that's heavily nuclear dependent to its knees.

On the other hand, solar and wind are hugely decentralized and distributed, making an attack that destroys these generators drastically more expensive. An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact.

But perhaps this flaw is alleviated by smaller scale reactors that produce a much smaller percentage of a region's electricity.

> An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact.

The most difficult part of the grid is the transmission infrastructure. The most valuable, high-lead-time part probably being the HV transformers that live near power plants.

Good planning would include keeping spares out of harm's way.

One wonders whether famously-protected Finland keeps spares.

Nuclear power plants create large amounts of waste that remain radioactive for thousands of years. In the United States, most nuclear waste is stored on site at the plant. This is because there is simply nowhere else to put it. Uranium is a natural material and will eventually run out, much like fossil fuels. In other words, cross nuclear off the list of sustainable energy. Solar energy would be the most obvious sustainable source, we just need better ways of converting the energy.

Large amounts of low radioactive waste that is safe to discard in 1 year.

The highly radioactive waste that lasts thousands of years is actually quite small.

> The U.S. produces as much as 160,000 cubic feet (4,530 cubic meters) of radioactive material from its nuclear power plants annually. [1]

> The Energy Department has a backlog of nuclear waste clean up responsibilities, with material dating back to World War II. [2]

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-let... [2] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2022/05/ener...

> 160,000 cubic feet (4,530 cubic meters)

Much of which stops being radioactive in the first year,

> The Energy Department has a backlog of nuclear waste clean up responsibilities, with material dating back to World War II.

Which is to be expected given that a (tiny) part of the waste is long term.

> Nuclear power plants create large amounts of waste that remain radioactive for thousands of years.

The article says otherwise. You can remove "large" from your sentence.

Pretty much each statement in your post is incorrect. Nuclear plants produce tiny amount of waste, which we know what to deal with. Amount of fuel if you count thorium is enough for many millennia. And solar can not possibly replace other forms of energy production, not in a state it's in. I don't know why you are spewing misinformation, but you are clearly not going to solve climate crisis with that attitude

Please don't cross into personal attack and name-calling. It's against the site guidelines. It also discredits what you're arguing for, and is therefore not in your interest.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> it's a juicy and easy target for an adversary to cripple your electricity production. A few dozen well placed missiles might be all you need to take an entire nation that's heavily nuclear dependent to its knees.

This is true for any other system of centralized energy production, including, notably, the one we have right now.

Note that we actually have wind and solar right now.

> An adversary might still be able to take out the grid by targeting transmission infrastructure, but recovering from it should be relatively quick because the actual generators are all still intact.

You underestimate the cost and lead times of the big distribution transformers found in grid substations. As an example, a fire two years ago on a substation transformer in the state of Amapá (while another transformer was broken and awaiting maintenance, and IIRC the third transformer of the set was also damaged by the fire) led to most of that state being without power for AFAIK nearly three weeks, until a replacement sent from another substation could be installed (and as a consequence, that other substation ended up without a spare until it could receive weeks later a replacement transformer from yet another substation). Note that building a new transformer instead of shuffling them between the substations wasn't an option, because it would take too long.

Estimates are that when the (technically already overdue) Pacific Northwest earthquake and tsunami rolls in, it will take two years to restore power to most of the coastal and downriver areas.

Eh, we live in an age when a few dozen well placed missiles can kill millions and destroy entire countries, not just their electrical grid. A few retaliatory strikes later and an entire region is gone, if not the world as a whole.

That doesn't sound like a very useful way to make decisions about anything except maybe missile defense and second strike capabilities. Anything can be destroyed with sufficient violence.

While this is technically true, I think a developed-ish nation might blow up your electric facilities before it would destroy a city.

There are many juicy targets like that, whether it's power plants or airports or dams or bridges or whatever. We don't typically worry about hardening them against smart munitions. If you're in a hot war with an adversary like that you're pretty screwed regardless.

There's just no practical way to harden all of it against attack. And a tiny chance of some hypothetical future war isn't a good reason to choose a technology (combusting fossil fuels) that's gonna kill your own citizens every year, guaranteed. Why do your hypothetical future enemy's job for them?

Attacking a nuclear plant on purpose will be seen as similar to attacking with a nuclear bomb in the eyes of the world.

If all you want to do is to knock out the electrical system of a country, you can use an EMP burst bomb over that country, and the grid will be down for months.

Few? Here is another: mining

“Many Navajo people have died of kidney failure and cancer, conditions linked to uranium contamination. And new research from the CDC shows uranium in babies born now.”

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/10/4735472...

Good thing renewables don't depend on dangerous mining...

...oh wait, https://hir.harvard.edu/not-so-green-technology-the-complica...

Solar does not depend on rare-earths. Most wind, likewise.

Solar panels and batteries require the damaging mining of all sorts of rare and/or nasty materials. This kills a lot of people, although predominantly in other countries nowadays. It's an argument that could be applied to nearly any mineral resource, and is more of an indictment of unsafe mining practices and capitalist exploitation. If we allowed practical research on breeder reactors, the need for uranium mining would nearly vanish.

Which rare/nasty mined material is required for solar panels? Be specific, and be sure you're talking about silicon, which is 95% of the PV market.

(Spoiler: there is no such material.)

Nuclear plants have containment buildings that can withstand strikes by artillery.

Nothing prevent us to put the grids safely protected under tons of concrete so they can't be destroyed to easily. Plus the bonus of isolate it better from water and flooding damage.

In peace time CO2 emissions from nuclear are at the same order of magnitude as hydro. Similarly, the number of deaths per twh produced is also similar to hydro. Both are at least an order of magnitude lower than coal.

A hydro plant can be attacked in a war situation just as much as a nuclear plant, so I don't see how that should be weighted as highly as you seem to imply. In fact, I'd argue that energy dependence on nations such as Russia are a much higher risk to geopolitical stability than nuclear power.

Also, we can build a nuclear plant in a desert country (where I live), but not much hydro. In fact, our hydro plants are generating less and less energy every year as our rivers are drying up.

Sadly nuclear plants cannot run without cooling water from rivers or sea.

True, but again there is Palo Verde nuclear plant that is located in the middle of the desert in Arizona and is cooled by sewage water from nearby cities.

Some new fast reactor designs don't even need water for cooling. Also, China has built an experimental thorium reactor in Gobi desert which also doesn't need water for cooling.

I believe a lot if interesting stuff is coming in a few years.

Just, not nuclear stuff.

What does that mean

Nukes are very, very far from competitive. So, whatever clever nuke ideas people have, they will not be built.

Look at the numbers though. Fossil fuels kill many people every year, while nuclear accidents are almost entirely hypothetical. The point of the article is to show that fears like the ones expressed above just aren’t supported by the data.

> nuclear accidents are almost entirely hypothetical

Nothing to see here.

> Serious nuclear power plant accidents include the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011), the Chernobyl disaster (1986), the Three Mile Island accident (1979), and the SL-1 accident (1961).

All of those accidents combined killed less than 10% of the people that are killed by fossil fuel pollution every single year. Most nuclear accidents are entirely hypothetical.

Has affected millions of peoples health already and whole ecosystems. And the consequences will cumulate from this thousands of years. Count that in your equation and get more informative numbers.

Whose health? Any actual data?

I think GP was talking about CO2 (affect millions already, will still be present in a thousand years)

This is in dollars, but 10% of healthcare spending in the US equates to a good amount of health I reckon https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...

I was asking about the GP's assertion about health impact of nuclear.

The dispersed fallout? Hard to quantify because of it's dispersedness and long term slowness. But it is for example plutonium and we know it's effects on life on Earth, so one could proceed from there with some math and futurological trend extrapolation. And simply by using the knowledge we have about plutonium mixed with common sense.

i’m not at all anti-nuclear but i’m not sure what you mean by

> most nuclear accidents are entirely hypothetical.

i also agree that fossil fuels kill a lot of people as well, only in slow-motion and we have some form of weird disconnect when something happens in slow-motion vs quick.

but again, nuclear accidents are not hyperbole nor are they hypothetical. again, i’m not anti-nuclear, i suspect we need a mix of strong decentralized renewables such as solar/wind and a filler of nuclear.

i’m no expert on nuclear accidents but my cynical take is that the building companies/orgs probably cut corners on safety in order to save money. and maybe that could be a area to improve safety—significantly overbuild on safety features. like i said tho, absolutely not an expert.

Just the nature of a plant requiring active management (and power) to prevent meltdown is a weak point. The reasonable answer to this concern imo is explaining how passive safety systems have advanced and are implemented in new reactor designs, and how plants are built so when intentionally attacked or incidentally damaged a meltdown or release of highly radioactive material does not ensue, especially for folks advocating for the widespread adoption of nuclear energy worldwide. Strikes me as odd that the typical response is instead 'but this old energy generation tech which we all agree needs to go has downsides'.

If we remove Chernobyl from this list, we'll find that probably just 1 person died from radiation after power plant accidents.

Fossil plants are killing millions of people every year.

During heatwave this year, when we had temperatures around 43C for almost 2 weeks, hundreds of people died in my country because our energy grids were overloaded and ACs turned off. And many people can't even afford to pay for AC energy bills anyway so they don't use it. Our energy needs are growing every year and energy production can't keep up.

We NEED cheap energy that nuclear can give. This is the matter of survival at this point.

SL-1 killed three people. However, it was a military reactor, not civilian.

If you have to resort to "it's better than fossil fuels" you have damned nuclear with faint praise. And you have also wasted our time, because nuclear is competing with renewables now, not with fossil fuels.

Okay, how about; it's safer than literally every other method of energy production? Less deaths per thousand terawatt-hours produced (90) than wind (150), solar (440), or hydroelectric (1400).

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

I already addressed that argument.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295591

If a statistical human life is worth $9 M, then 440 deaths per thousand TWh adds $0.004/kWh to the cost of solar. This cannot overcome the large cost advantage solar and wind have over nuclear in most places (even with storage costs included). Also, the 440 figure is, I believe, assuming rooftop solar. At scale to power the world solar will be mostly ground mounted.

If you don't agree with that statistical value, and think it should be higher, why you've just argued we're not imposing enough safety systems on nuclear plants -- because $9 M is the value the NRC uses when determining if additional safety systems are warranted.

And I happen to think the NRC is wrong and the vast number of safety regulations imposed on nuclear power is harmful to the ultimate goal of getting off coal as quickly as possible. We should be building more nuclear reactors, even if we lower safety standards to do so, to reduce dependency on fossil fuels and the ongoing ecological disaster they entail. But that won't happen because both fossil fuel lobbyists and environmentalists loathe nuclear power.

Decades of accumulated safety regulations have added massively to the capital costs to nuclear reactors and offer covering fire for fossil fuel lobbies to continue to distract people with renewables, which are always just around the corner and about to overtake everything (between 2009 and 2019, the global share of energy produced by renewable sources has risen from 7% to 10% - a real green revolution!).

But here's the real kicker - when nuclear reactors get taken offline, as happened in California and Germany recently, they are replaced by fossil fuels. Not solar. Not wind.

You can't count solar or wind deaths at present because neither is a viable power system.

To count deaths you need to look at a whole system--solar, wind + the gas plants that cover the gaps, or the hypothetical storage system that covers the gaps. Since we can't count deaths from a tech that doesn't even exist it's solar + wind + gas -- and most of those deaths will be from the gas.

This is the same tiring argument - using plane crashes to say that flying is unsafe, because it makes headlines once a crash happens, while tens of thousands of people die every year on the roads. But hey, diffuse deaths, nobody cares about it.

So the anti-nuclear guys keeping point at the same list of 3-4 incidents time and time again, unable to recognize the ridiculousness and weakness of their argument - and the fact that their opposition to nuclear actively kills people year after year.

stupid comparisons, ironic... how many planes are there? How many of them crashed? And now ask yourself the same thing for nuclear plants

Actually, your comparison between planes and cars is quite adapt. The airline industry likes to use death per km as a measure and you are correct they come out very safe with that measure. However, experts have argued that it is a very flawed metric because of the vary different distances covered by both means and the way risk is distributed (i.e. for flying the risk is almost entirely in the starti g and landing phase, while for a drive it is evenly distributed over the trip). If you use a metric like deaths per hour flying does not look so much more safe that driving actually (essentially the same as driving) [1]

[1] https://observer.com/1998/03/driving-versus-flying-the-debat... couldn't find a more up to date source

But people generally aren't choosing between driving somewhere 120 miles away or flying somewhere 1150 miles away. Generally, someone already has a destination in mind, and then chooses whether to drive or fly to get there. That makes deaths by time an extremely flawed metric, and deaths by distance the correct one to use.

Maybe yours is a US perspective, but I never decided between flying and driving. I fly when driving or the train typically does not make sense, i.e. flights over 800km. I'm not sure even in the US is such a decision, most people will not drive from the east to the west coast, while only a small percentage of people would take flying from e.g. LA to San Diego over driving

Hypothetical, but the occurrence of future large scale conflict is overwhelmingly likely. This will remain a valid concern - not just accidents, but intentional attacks - until design of plants advances to be robust against strikes to failsafe without active management

> Hypothetical, but the occurrence of future large scale conflict is overwhelmingly likely.

If you are worrying about future large scale conflict then nuclear plants will be the least of your problems causing death and other things.

I'd be willing to bet you don't actually believe a post-war Ukraine with several metropolitan areas flattened is no worse off if widespread radioactive contamination is added.

Ukraine does not quality as "a large scale conflict" in any measure. If we had ww3, you'd be much more likely to die by actual nukes falling from the skies than residual radiation form destroyed nuclear plants.

> Ukraine does not quality as "a large scale conflict" in any measure.

That is incorrect. Large scale != global or world war. It's a moot point though.

Large scale involves more than two countries focusing on a single region, typically. Otherwise words have absolutely no meaning anymore.

No, that isn't correct. Still it's a moot point. Feel free to either change my example from Ukraine to a hypothetical larger area if you care, or change large to regional scale — regardless 'if there is military action that could affect nuclear plants it will involve nuclear weapons and kill us anyway' is a poor argument.

> No, that isn't correct.

What isn't correct? What's the definition of a large scale conflict then? Anything above 2 neighbors fighting over their fence?

> egardless 'if there is military action that could affect nuclear plants it will involve nuclear weapons and kill us anyway' is a poor argument.

How is that a poor argument. In war you care about what is the most likely to kill you. Nukes are a very real risk when there's 50 000 out there ready to be launched at one moment's notice. Radiations that would kill you in 30 years is the least of anyone's worry. Just like you don't care about a cancer that could kill you 10 years from now if you are run over by a car.

State level conflict has been the norm since the rise of agriculture. Not worrying about it would be gross incompetence.

If countries are more self sufficient with their energy security needs, it removes one of the major causes of conflict.

Energy, water, food, resource security. Back to basics.

I doubt the self sufficiency yielded by global nuclear proliferation would offset how target-rich the world would become, come inevitable war.

I'd rather the answer be a push for more advances in passive safety and planning that treats military attack as an eventuality.

After Chernobyl you still today cannot eat fish from the lakes and rivers in 1000+ km radius from the site by Finnish recommendations. Because they are top predators and have enriched the gamma dose in themselves. How often could you eat human meat?

Fish are not safe to eat in the entirety of Poland? Haha this is news to me.

Finland. In Finland. According to Finnish authorities. Countries with East Block histories like Poland tend to not care as much what the actual science of the stuff is. Nor does the Nuclear Is Clean - crowd is seems. "Everything radiates; just look at the bonfire, it's radiation". Yeah, right.

That's a ridiculous generalization about E. block countries.

> "Everything radiates; just look at the bonfire, it's radiation".

Perhaps you should become a bit more informed before spouting nonsense like this.

> After Chernobyl you still today cannot eat fish from the lakes and rivers in 1000+ km radius from the site by Finnish recommendations.

Limit your eating of pike, but otherwise no major objections:

> Children, young people and persons of fertile age may not eat pike caught in a lake or in the sea more often than once or twice a month.

> Dioxin and PCB levels in fish from inland waters are normally low, and mercury levels are lower in other lake fish than in pike. The mercury and cesium-137 levels of fish vary from one lake to the other.

* https://www.ruokavirasto.fi/en/private-persons/information-o...

Ok yes my bad forgot to post the limits. At least used to be lake fish two times in week tops.

It is not recommended to eat the fish from the river where I live more than twice a month. That's just standard historic mining pollution.

Coal poisons the water far worse, both from mining, air pollution, and coal ash. It even emits far more radiation than nuclear power.

Not to mention mercury, which is forever.

That’s an interesting, theoretical point. The containment structures around a nuclear plants are designed to withstand forces more powerful than even advanced artillery, so there’s really no chance a stray rocket breaks the structure. A concerted effort is a possibility, but it’s not a tactic we’ve ever see used so far and I think the strategic value of doing so is limited. If an adversary had a fully subterranean power grid, maybe an attack on a nuclear plant could make sense, but that’s hypothetical because most energy infrastructure around the world is not protected in anyway.

But another takeaway from the current conflict is how incredible nuclear is at shoring up energy security. A nuclear plant can easily keep 18 months of fuel onsite as required storage space is trivial. A 2 or 3 year strategic reserve of uranium would likewise be a trivial project.

Meanwhile other base load sources like coal need dozens of rail cars worth of coal every single day. Gas needs a pipeline or again daily shipments of LNG.

So now Russia has cut off the gas and energy costs in Europe are exploding and they are having to build out tons of new LNG infrastructure.

Russia can basically turn the heat off in Europe because they under invested in nuclear power.

Russians never wanted to truly damage any reactor, including the one at Zaporizhzhia; they made some noise to spread fear and remind the world about the dangers of nuclear war and what could happen should anyone think of attacking them over there. Then they seized the reactors to take control of powerful sources of energy so they could cut them at will, then amassed weapons there for being the safest places around. Their strategy there was 50% PsyOps, that is, propaganda, and 50% military tactics. I find it extremely unlikely, but should something nasty happens to any of the Ukrainian nuclear reactors, it will be 99.9% by mistake.

Could one aim be to increase anti-nuclear sentiment in Europe to further delay/prevent nuclear power development which would reduce dependency on Russian fossil fuels?

Although this would have no effect short-term since plants take a long time to build.

You do have a relevant point. In time of war safety of many things cannot be guaranteed. However, I promise you, for the Ukrainians the bigger issue is not the reactor. It is a concern, but it is not the major concern.

While Russia has been irresponsible with how they dealt with Ukrainian nuclear reactors, I don't think they're that much of a problem in case of invasion as you suggest: if an attacker really wants your land, they'd prefer if it is not covered by nuclear fallout.

A counterpoint is that wind and solar are impossible to defend in a conflict (especially off-shore wind), and can be irretrievably wrecked with minimal risk to the attacking force. I don't think this should be any sort of impediment to putting renewables everywhere we can though. If there is a war big enough that countries are destroying each other's energy infrastructure we'll almost all be dead anyway. Nuclear winters will kill solar production (and also most of the demand, I guess).

Nuclear energy is safe but humans are not.

Yep. It's amazing the effort we have to spent to avoid disasters provoked by our own specie.

Yes.

So we have to make decisions with those two factors in mind

We have people dying of breathing complications right now and we have so much CO2 in our atmosphere that we're changing the weather.

We need nuclear energy precisely because humans are not safe.

When you say "nuclear", do you mean all forms of fission reactors? Or do you mean today's inferior designs? Your comment makes sense in the context of conventional light-water reactors. However, there exist more advanced reactor designs that are essentially meltdown-proof.

How close are they to commercial implementation

The small nuclear reactor designs by NuScale are commercially viable and are going to be approved by the nuclear regulatory commission rather soon. Thorium isn’t as important as the small and modular aspects. Also Gen IV and breeder reactors are basically perfectly viable commercially if it was held to the same kind of scrutiny as most other power sources whether it’s coal or solar. But politically it’s not viable which is expressed by being so hard to finance with long time scales that investors simply don’t have the patience and nobody can raise the capital worthwhile to bother trying. It’s very much a chicken-egg dynamic impeding its viability similar to what popular renewables faced for different reasons for several decades.

Note that South Korea and France both have large operational nuclear power that is rather cheap to deploy because they basically copy-paste the same proven design and processes again and again. South Korea in particular has been under constant threat of attack by its neighbors for basically over a thousand years now yet went with nuclear decades ago. Comparatively, Switzerland didn’t choose nuclear for reasons I can’t quite remember even though they are fully capable technologically and in terms of process / bureaucracy able to manage the systems perfectly safely. Unsure about France’s reasoning but it’s difficult to compare power costs between France and neighboring Germany in good faith comparisons of energy policy either due to how different their electrical grid needs are.

NuScale is extremely heavily subsidized, both in development (50%) and initial deployments (100%), by US taxpayers.

It is absolutely uncompetitive, without.

There are several that will be deployed in Canada over the next few years [0] and the government seems committed to investing in SMR technology [1]

[0] https://x-energy.com/media/news-releases/x-energy-canada-and...

[1] https://smrroadmap.ca/

> Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happens

On the surface this is very true. However, types of solar have caveats that do not manifest until you have a certain amount of utilization in the grid. Photovoltaics do not contribute to inertia. This is the Newtonian concept that ensures instantaneous voltage stability separate from any active demand/generation management functions. The more inertia you have, the more work it takes to speed up or slow down the grid.

Hypothetically, a grid that is 50% PV solar and 50% others would experience severe stability issues if the other class of generation were to be substantially impacted (i.e. your big-bang-for-buck military targets).

You cannot run a power grid on PV solar alone. It just won't work at scale.

> Photovoltaics do not contribute to inertia. This is the Newtonian concept that ensures instantaneous voltage stability separate from any active demand/generation management functions.

Wait what, Newton's inertia was about physical objects, not voltage stability? You talking base vs peak demand or what?

That voltage stability is electromagnetically coupled to huge chunks of spinning iron. That's your inertia. It buffers voltage spikes. Solar, and surprisingly enough wind as well, do not contribute to this stability. It's one of the big challenges we need to figure out.

Actually, this is something I'm not clear on: Why can't we just add free-spinning "generators" to the grid to contribute inertia?

Costs money. And, unnecessary.

It's pretty clearly necessary to solve. And any kind of energy generation costs money. So I don't think that, unqualified, those are good reasons.

Free-spinning wheels generate no energy. Electronics do the job much cheaper.

The rotors of electrical generators are physical objects, with inertia.

> Photovoltaics do not contribute to inertia.

Besides "synthetic inertia" on the PV inverters, there exist also synchronous condensers (basically a motor/generator spinning a heavy mass) which can already be found in many substations.

Batteries are more "inertia" than any rotational generator could ever hope to be. Inertia is only a concept because the grid has traditionally relied on rotational generators (which do have inertia). It's by no means necessary for the functioning of a power grid - isolated inverters don't need it, nor do portable rotational generators.

It's useful in traditional grids because we didn't have electronics that could more or less instantaneously respond to load changes - they had to rely on spinning generators instead.

Even with synthetic inertia supplied by every inverter, you will still eventually run into a situation where the system begins to oscillate wildly if you do not have enough spinning mass.

What does a large spinning mass do that a computer-controlled inverter with batteries cannot?

I will grant you a hypothetical wherein the inverters are all perfectly synchronized by some central system and have no reliance on grid voltage as the primary signaling mechanism.

But, this is a precipitous arrangement. If there is any drift in the clocks or some fault in the sync protocol, you can quickly wind up with a completely dead grid (because all your inverters will have killed each other).

Spinning metal is very simple and robust. The failure modes are all much more gradual in nature. Today, one or 2 bad inverters would not start a chain of horrible events because hundreds of tons of metal are not easily perturbed. Without inertia, a bad element in the grid can have substantially more impact.

I must admit to not being an expert in the matter - but it seems odd to expect inverters to spontaneously desync. Grid-tie inverters take their cue from the existing grid presence, so it's not like we'll have a grid full of inverters attempting to drive their own frequency slowly getting out of sync. I don't actually know how they work, but presumably they will attempt to match the available frequency at their outputs within some tolerance of their own notion of 50/60Hz (eg. they want 50Hz, if grid is 50.5 they will match that, if grid is 51 problems might start - but that's a bit contrived)

A grid without rotating generators would act differently, for sure, as you won't have varying frequency to indicate if the grid is overloaded - you'd have to rely on different measures to understand how close parts of it might be to failure.

"Bad actors" in the grid can already cause severe problems regardless of spinning generators; if a power station goes offline the unexpected load spike can easily trip off most of the grid anyway. Smaller, distributed generators/inverters if anything are more reliable, as a fault in one is less likely to constitute an outsize portion of power generation. "Grid inertia" today is largely a result of the total machinery attached to the grid just massively outweighing any individual actor.

Inverters that see excess frequency make a point of lagging. Collectively, they can bring the frequency back in line, just as control systems in rotating machinery do.

The rotating machines are wholly as dependent on controls as the inverters.

It's a weird argument to say "Nuclear does this, solar does not" as if the two are against one another and you are comparing them.

Here, I'll do the same thing: "Nuclear produces power 24/7, while solar can only usefully produce power for ~8 hours a day, or 1/3 of the day".

Sure, for that 1/3 of the day, solar does not have political problems like being shut down for danger. However, for 2/3 of the day, nuclear does not have the physics problem of being useless.

Each solution has pros and cons and I want my power to come from both.

Solar + storage produces 24/7, overwhelmingly cheaper and without risk of regional poisoning.

Real world grid scale solar + storage is not cheaper, and humanity doesn't even have the battery capacity and won't for some time longer.

And speaking of regional poisoning, I guess all of those heavy metal mines in poorer countries creating some quite dystopian scenes of large scale ecological destruction leading to total ecosystem collapse are OK because "NIMBY"! Can't wait to 10X that, especially when I remember that the energy density of nuclear fuels is so insanely high that the mining impact for powering all of humanity on it is something like 50X less than powering all of humanity on lithium batteries!

Heavy metal mines, like uranium? Because what other heavy metals are you imagining?

You missed the part (well, you IGNORED the part...) where I talk about energy density.

That's obvious because you don't want to compare the amount of lithium required for billions of cars and grid scale solar to cover 16 hours of energy per day.

You ignored it because 8 kWh of heat can be generated from 1 kg of coal, approx. 12 kWh from 1 kg of mineral oil and around 24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235.

Not only is uranium extremely energy dense, but power facilities are extremely small. Nuclear facilities are by far the smallest energy producing facilities, and solar fields are among the largest (both in terms of space and raw materials). This produces mining and material savings at every single step.

A world powered by Uranium only would require probably somewhere between 10,000X to 100,000 less mining than a world powered by solar batteries.

The energy density of uranium is truly amazing.

Energy density is absolutely irrelevant except in a vehicle. Which utility power manifestly ain't.

And the energy density of uranium is irrelevant even sessile, because it takes hundreds to thousands of times more mass around it to get useful energy out.

I had ignored it so as not to embarrass you further.

Lol wow! This feels like one of those situations that Germans have a very long and special word for: When someone tries to spare you a minor embarrassment but in doing so creates a major one for themselves.

While you might not think several orders of magnitude have meaning, fortunately here in reality the fact that it requires far less overall mining to create and supply a uranium power station that it does to create and supply an equivalent (in power output) solar field with batteries has huge meaning.

While I do thank you for looking out for me, I urge you to in the future take time to introspect on yourself and views, so as to save yourself these issues. I know no one tries to be a hypocrite intentionally, so I know these are resolvable problems for the average HN'er. Good luck!

What matters in (clean) utility power generation is cost. Period.

Unless this magickal energy density results in lower-cost electrical output, in quantity, it is just a load of guff.

What we know is that every use of uranium for civil power generation, ever, delivered only extremely expensive power. There has never been a single reactor, worldwide, that was not heavily subsidized by taxpayers, coerced above-market rates, or both. Nukes get even less competitive with each passing year, as the cost for renewables continues plummeting with no bottom in sight.

So, the compelling evidence is that energy density is of extremely limited value for civil power generation. If it has any practical value at all, its copious orders of magnitude are yet insufficient to overcome its extremely poor cost effectiveness.

And, places in the US where uranium was mined are marked by poisoned groundwater and early death. Those poisoned are not impressed with its magick. Nor am I.

Dedicated batteries are not cheaper yet, but (a) price is still on a rapid downward trend, (b) repurposing old batteries from electric cars once the batteries are no longer good enough for transport is cheaper, and (c) it isn't the only storage mechanism, for example pumped hydroelectric and hydrogen are both really cheap.

The battery production capacity is currently in a rapid growth phase. I'm not sure what timescales you think are "for some time longer", but I think 10 (optimistic) to 20 years (pessimistic) would be enough to see the global electricity market almost totally (95% or more) transformed to renewables.

While I personally am relaxed about nuclear power if it's done right, the political realities are that it terrifies people and that corners get cut just often enough to make the terror not entirely unjustified, so it's not going to happen on a significant scale unless there's a reason for the government to ignore the will of the people.

particularly relevant because the need for more energy is by far strongest in regions that are geopolitical hotbeds with often unstable governments and threats of terrorism. With nuclear infrastructure both as a target and source for material.

Solar leaks heavy metals into top soil. Most of solar is not recycled properly. Nobody seems to worry about that at all.

If a solar facility gets carpet bombed during a war, you think it's more likely it will all just get somewhat cleaned up, and lots of it will be left in-situ and plowed over, or someone will actually remove every little dust particle? I think the lazy way out is what is most likely.

There is no heavy metal in solar to leak.

If you have to make shit up to support your argument, why even bother?

what? Lead and cadmium ARE heavy metals. You didn't know?

https://scdhec.gov/sites/default/files/Library/OR-1695.pdf

"Solar panel waste can include heavy metals such as silver, lead, arsenic and cadmium that – at certain levels – may be classified as hazardous waste"

Balancing that against the future of the planet, I know which one I'll choose; nuclear all day long.

In some respects, vulnerability to attack is a feature, not a flaw for promoting peace and collaboration instead of violence. A country with nuclear reactors is less likely to piss neighbors off enough to lead to an invasion. If invasion occurs, everyone will be extra careful. A country with nuclear reactors is less likely to be bombed to shit by other countries due to the reactor's radioactivity inventory potentially containing other countries as well as the country in question - ie. don't spoil the prize.

> In some respects, vulnerability to attack is a feature, not a flaw for promoting peace and collaboration instead of violence. A country with nuclear reactors is less likely to piss neighbors off enough to lead to an invasion.

That feels like saying "a woman who's not allowed to carry pepper spray is less likely to dress provocatively enough to lead to getting raped".

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